


The Songs Within Us (Year One)

by odinswhiteraven



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, The 100 (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Angst, Bullying, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Drama, Enemies, F/F, F/M, Family Drama, Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-16 20:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odinswhiteraven/pseuds/odinswhiteraven
Summary: First part in a coming of age tale that will span the seven years it takes to graduate Hogwarts.Bellamy Blake and Clarke Griffin meet for the first time on the Hogwarts Express. They come from very different beginnings, different families, and different worlds. But they are, in this very moment, 11 years old and preparing to embark on their own separate journeys throughout first year autumn and winter in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They will make decisions, meet characters, and encounter situations that not only shape who they are at this moment in time, but lay down the foundations of who they will become in future years to come. Watch as the blossoms of youth get overtaken by shadows of the past and winds of change over the horizon.Disclaimer: Relationships and friendships will VASTLY differ from canon. There will be cameos and mentions from the HP fandom. Major and minor characters from the 100 will be there. I neither own the 100 nor Harry Potter franchises. This is a work of fanfiction. The works this is based off of belong to Kass Morgan, the producers at the CW, and JK Rowling. I also do not own the chapter songs that are advertised.[SEASON ONE IS NOW COMPLETE!]





	1. Fatum

**Author's Note:**

> A chance encounter on a train from here to there. 
> 
> "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Eva Cassidy

Bellamy Blake met her for the first time in a compartment that held more than enough room to accommodate others. She sat by herself, reading a tattered copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, by Newt Scamander. Bellamy remembered seeing such a book from a store in Diagon Alley when the Auror, Marcus Kane, brought him around to gather supplies for the school year.

The girl had been already dressed in her pristine school robes and sported newly polished slacks. Her blonde hair already tethered upon her head in an unorthodox, wild-looking braid with curls peeling out every now and then from the sides. Bellamy wondered if the girl was a first year, same as him. They could be friends if they were. She would be his very first one. After he mulled it over in his head, he decides he’d like that.

“Can I sit here?” There was no point in saying ‘please’, there was enough space for them both.

Silence. He cleared his throat and repeated the request.

The girl’s eyes widened at his sudden interruption before rising above the book’s pages. “Pardon?”

“Pardon?” Bellamy couldn't help himself from snorting. What color were they? Her eyes. Were they green or blue? They looked in between even in this compartment’s lighting. “Who talks like that?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I talk like that.”

“I guess, if you’re all into the fancy life…”

“What is THAT supposed to mean?”

“I just mean that it’s stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“See? That’s much better-”

The blonde girl shut her book with enough force to make it snap. “What do you want?” They were blue. Her eyes. He could see that now. Blue like ice. The kind of ice from bergs that sank ships at sea.

Bellamy gulped. He hadn’t meant to anger her. Okay, maybe he had. “I need somewhere to sit.”

“And?”

“And there’s no one else in here but you.”

“So?”

“What do you mean ‘so’? I want to sit.”

“Why?”

“Oh, for bloody- forget this!”

“Hey!”

Bellamy plopped down in the seat across from her, crossing his arms at the chest and leaning way back against the seat. His head turned, facing away from her, out to the window. At children saying goodbye to their families, parting away from them. He felt the heavy weight in his chest sink lower.

“Excuse me!”

He rolled his eyes, but from the periphery he could make out the blurry indignation of a face. Her mouth looked to be agape with an outrage so petulant, so childish that it came from…well a child.

“What now?” Bellamy sighed.

“I never said you could sit down.”

“Tough eggs.” He huffed, “You don’t own the train.”

“Neither do you!”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one whinging about where I can and cannot sit.”

“Whinging? W-what are you-”

“What’s the matter?” Bellamy sneered, “You know pardon, but you don’t know whinging?”

“I do too know what it means!” The girl retorted in a shrill voice. She looked shocked by him, as if he couldn't be allowed, no, as if no one had ever talked to her like this. Ever. Bellamy wondered if that was even possible.

“Then what does it mean?”

“It means …” She trailed off, biting her lower lip and eyebrows furrowed in concentration, “… I know what it means.” She mumbled. Her blue eyes darted back and forth from left to right, up and down. As if the answer were hidden here, somewhere in the compartment with them. “It means…”

“I’m waiting, princess.”

The blonde girl bristled at that, her shoulders trembling. “DON’T call me that.” She snapped back.

“Well if the crown fits.”

“You absolute-”

Bellamy pretended that he couldn’t quite hear her, put his hand over his ear and huddled in closer.

“Pig of a toadstool-”

Mimicking her furrowed eyebrows and biting his lower lip in mock concentration.

“Stupid, hairy, smelly-”

Judging from the increase of volume and tension in her words, he could tell he was getting to her.

“TROLL!”

He nodded in appreciation, as if her biting remarks were praises instead of insults. But then pretended that whatever he heard, he just now forgot. And then asked confusedly: “Pardon?”

The blonde girl treated him as if he were a grotesque. She turned her body sideways, as far from his side of the compartment as possible so that they were diagonally apart rather than across and buried her face in her book. She didn’t speak, didn’t even spare him a glance. He didn’t even get her name. There had been a smile he gave that was sad, but something told him that she hadn't seen it.

Bellamy felt the Hogwarts Express begin to move away from Kings Cross station, no doubt spewing tar black smoke from its pipes before chugging away. He saw the families waving at the children waving from adjacent windows. Neither he nor the girl participated. He wondered if she was similar, the ones without families of their own. Bellamy grimaced. He never gave Kane his letter.

The man who found him wandering the streets all those years ago, covered in his mother’s blood and calling for his sister, Octavia but to no avail. The man who fed him, bathed him, and dressed him when no other Order of Phoenix member would. The man who had been the closest thing to a father he ever knew, would ever know. Bellamy wrote a letter to give to him, but in his trunk, it remained.

There had been no words between them after they braved Platform 9 and ¾ and they merely shook hands and exchanged nods. Kane had even clasped his hand on his shoulder for a moment, squeezing firm, before releasing him to walk onto the train. There were no words between them.

Bellamy heard the word ‘traumatized’ being thrown around when Kane first brought him back to headquarters. Words like ‘broken’ and ‘orphan’ and the phrase ‘poor Muggle child’ soon followed.

He still remembered the words that poured out of his mouth after they fed him Chocolate Frogs and butterbeer to calm his nerves. He had finished the piggy back ride Octavia had asked of him, the braided pigtail he made for her swaying with every gallop. His mother had called them for supper, her smile a respite in the filthy flat they lived in. Then the people had come to his home in the night and ripped it all apart.

That was it. That was all he remembered. He didn’t know where all the blood came from or where Octavia was or why his mother had looked like that. He didn’t cry then. In front of their leader Thelonious Jaha and Kane, who eyed his monotone explanation and inflexible body with horror.

Before blacking out, he remembered saying: “They stole Octavia. I think they took her from me.”

Kane never told him how long it took for him to get better. They brought him to St. Mungo’s and there he stayed. He slept, ate, walked around the grounds, before repeating the endless cycle for weeks and weeks. It was like jail, but people were taking care of him inside of it. Sometimes they brought him to walk in the hallways and past the rooms where there were others. Just like him.

Bellamy knew he cried. Knew he wailed and shouted and covered his ears before retreating in the corner of whatever room he was in. One time, he had been outside, and he kept backing up until he fell into the pond they had there. They moved his room to a padded one, one without any windows.

Kane was the only one who visited. Out of everyone from that bunker in the ground where they brought him to talk about what happened. Kane brought books to read. It was what he loved to do.

Every week he came and every week he read to him. Bellamy looked forward to the visits. Listened to him speak in a low, but gravely voice. Sometimes he brought his wand out and made the pages of the book transform into paper characters of whatever he was reading. Kane looked to be pulling their strings when he made them dance and fight with one another. Bellamy whooped whenever there was an enormous battle and the paper figures, smashed against themselves until they became pages again. They bonded with the paper Kane made from the stories. Watched cities form. Watched alliances crumble into betrayal. Watched love blossom between heroes and hate fester among villains. All of it had been laid out in front of him in paper.

There were, what Kane deemed, ‘Muggle’ classics: Watership Down. Lord of the Rings. Treasure Island. Robinson Crusoe. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

But his favorite had been when Kane asked him for a recommendation. And Bellamy recommended the Iliad and the Odyssey. Because those were stories his mother used to read him before Octavia was born. Before he had to share her love with his little sister, a love that had been all his once upon a time.

Kane agreed. And then his stories and the paper figures became the legends and myths from mythologies of old. Of gods and mortals and the trials and tribulations born from their interactions. Of Achilles. And Hector. Ajax and Odysseus. Apollo and Artemis. Zeus and Hades. Prometheus.

Bellamy still had nightmares. Still woke up screaming and crying for hours and hours before the nurses found him and the orderlies restrained him for a goodnight draught. One time he sliced his arm open with a shard of glass from the mirror he broke to see if he could turn into pages too. Could join the adventures in all the stories.

Kane stopped coming after that. He didn’t know if it was because of what he did or because St. Mungos told him not to bother anymore. Bellamy missed him. Asked for him. Never a response.

One day, Bellamy asked the nurses for some paper. He wanted so much to have his mother and sister with him. Maybe, he thought, if he put his family back together again, Kane would return. And then he would meet his mother and then become his father. Octavia would finally have a dad.

When one of the nurses came to him with dinner, they dropped the tray they were carrying. The plates and utensils smashed and clattered on the floor. Beside him had been his paper mother cradling his paper sister on the bed they assigned. His family made from all the papers he asked for. He had forgotten how he had done it. He just wished for them to return and then there they were. Kane came later that night, with Jaha, after the hospital contacted them. The two men found him with his paper family and stared in disbelief.

Bellamy began living with Kane soon after, who told him all about Hogwarts. About how it was home for him for the longest of time and he prayed that it would be the same for him. Kane told him how he too was alone for a time, just like Bellamy, when he was very young. He had been angry and sad and lost as well. It was Hogwarts that got him through it. Not just the lessons he learned and the magic he saw. But the adventures he embarked on and the friends he made along the way. Those, in his mind, were the greatest victories in all of his youth. His friends.

The train took them through the English countryside now, there were voices and footfalls and laughter from other compartments. But theirs had been silent. Dead to the rest of the world.

“I’m sorry.”

The blonde girl’s already tense figure became stiller, more rigid. From the safety of her tattered book, two blue eyes slowly rose above. Cautious. Hesitant. Even scared.

“I shouldn’t have teased you about all those things.” Bellamy looked at his hands, wringing themselves together, and chewed the inside of his cheeks. “It was rude.”

She opened her mouth but closed it all the same. Her face in full view now, away from the book. Her skin pale, but smooth. Very well kept, clean. Nothing at all like him. He knew that now.

“Be my friend.” Bellamy meant for it to be a question, but it turned into a statement all the same.

The silence between them in the compartment was wider than the farms and fields the train passed.

“If you want forgiveness,” the blonde girl said cautiously, closing her book quieter than she did the last time and placing it on her lap. She inched closer to the window he leaned against and she too leaned her body against it, so they faced each other, “I can give you that. You’re forgiven.”

Bellamy released a breath he didn’t even know he was holding. He smiled at her and tentatively extended his hand towards her: “Bellamy.” The blonde girl clasped his with her own.

“Clarke.” For some reason he imagined her hand to feel smaller than his, but it felt just the same.


	2. Light From The Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy and Clarke bond.
> 
> "Wake Up" by Arcade Fire

The servants had woken her up that morning. Helped her dress, fed her the full English breakfast, and carried her already packed trunk to the car. They had been the ones who drove her to Kings Cross and encouraged her when she pushed her trolley past the 9 and ¾ barrier. Her maid and the driver were all there to see her off. She hugged all of them and kissed their cheeks one by one. Clarke Griffin wished her parents were here, but they had been too busy. Her mother most of all, but…

…her father had fed her an amazing dinner when they visited Beaubaxtons the night before. Her father’s close friend Anya worked there as a teacher. Clarke had made her promise to take her on as a student after she finished with Hogwarts. Anya laughed along with her father as she gave them the tour of the school, fondly whispering, “Fille stupide” as she brought them towards the kitchens complete with house elves prepping crème brulee and macaroons for afternoon tea.

In the kitchen, her father sat Anya down and placed Clarke on her lap, before rolling up his sleeves and donning an apron out of thin air with the flick of his hand. Anya tickled Clarke as she giggled.

Jake Griffin cooked them both croque madame sandwiches, took a bite of Anya’s as she mopped up on the egg and cheese on his chin with a handkerchief. They had been staring at one another for a long time before Clarke interrupted them with an empty plate prompted against his elbow.

“Seconds?”

France had been wonderful this time of year. The lights, the smells, the music in the air. Her father Apparated them onto the top of the Eiffel Tower and the two of them drank in the beautiful sights the city provided.

“Will mother come?” Clarke asked her father, hopefully. She wanted them all to see this together.

Her father smiled that tired smile of his and changed the subject, like he ALWAYS did whenever sad news approached. He poked her cheek with his finger when he saw her frown. “Your mother is very busy with the Ministry at the moment.”

Clarke turned away from him and went to the railing. She would not ruin everything because she was feeling too upset to continue. Her mother used to punish her for that years ago, before her father demanded that she stop.

Always crying, why are you always crying? Those had been words her mother used whenever Clarke begged her not to go to work. Stop being so weak. Grow. Up.

“I’m very busy too, you know. Especially with tomorrow.” Her father mentioned when he walked to her side. She refused to look at him. “Your mother and I, we love our work at the Ministry.”

Clarke felt him press his lips to her temple and brushed her hair back in broad, rough strokes. He always claimed he was taming the ocean that was her hair. She smiled back at him, although sadly.

“But we love you more.”

“I want you to see me get on the train.” Clarke muttered, her lips quivering. She turned to bury her face in his stomach, too short for her own good. “I want you to be the last thing I see before I go.”

“Clarke-”

“It’s not fair!”

“This will not be the only time you will be going to Hogwarts. There will be plenty of times for you to get on the train and for me to see you off.”

“It’s the first time I will be going!”

“You won’t be alone.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know you are.” Her father rubbed his hand in circles on her back, “So was I. That’s normal.”

“What if no one likes me.” Clarke sniffled, squeezing her father’s waist even tighter, trying to hug the tears from her eyelids. “What if no one wants to be my friend.”

Jake Griffin knelt to face his daughter’s height and leveled her face to meet his. He sternly said: “Not possible. You’re too wonderful to be by yourself and the other children will see to that.”

She shook her head, “They won’t.”

“They will.” Jake insisted, wrapping her up in one of his signature bear hugs and spinning her around until her sobs turned to shrieks of laughter. “Because you’re that special kind of person!”

They sat side by side afterwards with two coffee almond nut ice cream cups her father conjured into their hands, eating quietly while watching the stars above the city of lights.

“I’m giving you my book.”

“What book?”

“The first book I ever read on the Hogwarts Express. It’ll keep you busy for the whole trip.”

“The whole trip?”

“Just until you get bored with it and decide to actually talk to someone.”

“Is that how you made friends back when you were my age?”

“That’s how I met Anya!”

The sound of their laughter lasted the rest of the night and well into the morning after. When she stepped onto the train to Hogwarts, alone, and without her parents there.

When the trolley came, Clarke saw an opportunity to bond with her compartment companion. He neglected to buy anything off the cart in favor of the horseradish and cheddar roast beef sandwich he pulled from his robes. His clothing didn’t look to be ratty, but they certainly weren’t new either. She worried that because that was all the food he had, he would choke if he didn’t have a drink to wash it all down with. Clarke took out her coin purse, thick with the Galleons and Sickles and Knuts her parents had supplied her with the last time they were together: helping her buy school supplies in Diagon Alley.

She bought an enormous flask of pumpkin cider, pumpkin pasties, jelly slugs, chocolate frogs, and fizzing whizzbees, and every flavored jelly beans. Bellamy stared at all of this with eyes wide open, his mouth already full with the roast beef of his sandwich. He had initially ripped into his sandwich ravenously, but soon slowed when he saw how many sweets she began taking off the cart.

The trolley lady left their compartment, whistling a happy tune after the purchases had been made.

“You are going to help me finish these.”

Bellamy swallowed, beating his chest with his fist to help him do just that. “What?”

“What else am I going to do with all of this?” Clarke gestured to the contents of her order with a grand showing of her hands, as if the movements could validate the enormity of their food situation.

“Why did you buy that much?”

“I don’t know!” She decapitated a Chocolate Frog with her teeth and sucked the fudge innards from its wound. Bellamy stared at her chocolate covered lips. “Are you going to help or what?”

Bellamy waited until Clarke began drawing and quartering another Chocolate Frog before grabbing one for himself and pulling it apart with his hands. He stuffed each part into his mouth

The two of them laughed at the absurdity of how brutally they were eating the chocolate. Bellamy nearly choked until Clarke swatted his shoulder and handed him the flask. They took turns chugging the pumpkin cider before turning their attention to the jelly slugs. Which they practiced stretching as far as they could, even holding a competition wherein the loser had to eat both slugs.

Bellamy gave the rest of his sandwich to her, which she finished off for him. It tasted surprisingly hearty, almost as hearty as the sandwich her father made for her and Anya back in France. When she asked who made his sandwiches for him, Bellamy responded with: “My dad.”

“My dad makes sandwiches for me too!” She exclaimed.

Clarke taught Bellamy the many assorted flavors of every flavored beans and they played a game called Jelly Bean Roulette, where they took turns sampling random jelly beans apiece. The first one unable to finish swallowing lost. Bellamy suffered a massive defeat when he reached vomit, which Clarke gloated about since she withstood booger.

They took turns taking long swigs from their flask, timing the other to see who could drink the longest. By the end, they laid across one another in their separate seats, facing opposite ways. The wrappers and containers of all their sweets, either finished or partially done, surrounded them on the floor and the adjacent seat cushions. Their bellies already felt full and they hadn’t even reached Hogwarts yet. By then the sky streaked into the bloody gold of early evening.

“Not bad for a princess.” Clarke groaned, clutching her stomach. “Huh?”

“You ate me under the table.” Bellamy chuckled, the flask of pumpkin cider dangling from his fingers. “I can’t believe you did that.”

“Better believe it.”

“You have a big stomach.”

“I wasn’t by myself.” Clarke raised herself gingerly, looking pointedly. “You were there too.”

“Don’t remind me.” Bellamy covered his eyes with his hand.

The silence returned between them. Only it hadn't been as far or wide as before. It shrank in acres.

“Are you nervous?” She asked.

“About what?” He responded.

“Hogwarts.”

“Not really.”

“Why not?”

“My dad said it’ll be home for us.”

“Home?”

“Yeah, he told me that the friends we meet help make it home.”

“Am I your friend?”

“Yeah.” Bellamy waited a bit before asking her: “Am I yours?”

“You are.” Clarke answered.

“I hope we’re in the same House.”

“Me too. You’d make a great Slytherin.”

“Slytherin?” Bellamy asked, uncertain of the name. “That’s one of the Houses, isn’t it?”

“The greatest.” She whispered, conviction lacing every word. “The greatest of them all.”

"What color is its animal?"

"A green snake."

“Cool.”

“That’s where I’m going.” Clarke pulled out her wand then, a crooked piece of weeping willow darker than the night beginning to take over the sky outside their windows. “It’s a family tradition.”

“Tradition?”

“All of my family has gone. My mother. My father.” She whirled her wand, the crooked branch of wood jagged and spiky in the dark, so that a firefly sputtered from its tip. And then came another. And another. And another. And before they knew it, their compartment became filled with the ons and offs of nature's light switches. “And now me.”

The fireflies buzzed around them, flashing their butts into the darkness, temporary beacons as fleeting as the fireworks Bellamy’s mother used to take him and Octavia to. He took out his own wand, a linear piece of dragon bone, and pointed it vertically to the ceiling.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“That’s okay,” Clarke touched her hand to his and moved his dragon bone wand in a gentle, swinging motion, the shape of a crescent dip. “I’ll show you.” A light breeze whistled from the tip of his wand, it whizzed and twirled and whirled, the smell of the ocean and sandy beaches burdened upon it. “See?”

“How did you do that?” Bellamy asked.

“My mother taught me,” There had been hesitation in her voice, a grimace, “Ahead of everyone else.”

“That’s amazing.”

“She’s part of his family you know.”

“Whose family?”

“Salazar Slytherin.”

“Didn’t he help make Hogwarts a school?”

“He did.”

“And your mom is part of his family?” Bellamy whistled at the end of that, clearly impressed.

“She is,” Clarke spoke with the kind of confidence that Bellamy recognized in people from the Order of Phoenix like Kane and Jaha: people who knew what they wanted and what the worth of their struggle meant to the rest of the world, those with a strong enough will to fight and die for their own, personal beliefs. “And so am I.”

“It must be nice.”

“What is?”

“To be part of a family.”

“You could be, too.” Clarke sat up in her seat to face Bellamy, smiling at him. “If you joined me in Slytherin.”

“I want to. I really do.” Bellamy sat up as well to face Clarke, he was grinning as well. “I hope they’ll take me."

“They will.” And it had been there, amid the fireflies and coolness of a conjured up sea breeze, when she said it: “So long as you aren’t a blood traitor.”

"What's that?"

"Something my mother taught me." Clarke whispered, twirling her wand around her fingers with precise movements again and again. "It isn't as bad a name as Mudblood, though."


	3. Sons Of The Lion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy loses his way.
> 
> "Little Lion Man" by Mumford and Sons

Echo Azgeda was the first new student to be called up for the Sorting among the first years. She looked to be a tall, willowy girl with a pretty face and a smirk that felt like the Great Lake they rowed across on their way to the castle. Bellamy felt uneasy, watching her smile at everyone, because like how the Giant Squid lurked underneath the Great Lake, he had a feeling something else was hiding underneath Echo’s smile.

Something as dark and slimy as the tentacles that reached up from the water. A scary unknown.

Headmistress McGonagall had been the one to call out her name to come up first. In the yellowish gloom of the Great Hall, ablaze with candelabras and chandeliers that revolved around the ceiling that reflected the night sky, complete with the stars and moon. Four massive, elongated tables equipped with their own personal banners hanging behind them on the walls reflected the Great Houses: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin. Their colors clashed against each other in a war of red, blue, yellow, and green. A never-ending dispute between factions based off beliefs.

When the Sorting Hat screeched out, “SLYTHERIN!”, the Slytherin table erupted in cheers. Bellamy searched the crowd of his fellow first years for Clarke and he saw her, grinning proudly. There were a hundred of them, the first years newly entering Hogwarts, and he was proud that Clarke was one of them. Bellamy winked at her when Clarke met his eye and she returned the gesture.

“Azgeda, Roan!” There were excited whispers now. Accompanied by ominous mutterings. From the first years and the other tables alike. Bellamy caught bits and pieces of the conversation going around. Apparently Roan had not been related to Echo in blood, they were neither siblings nor cousins. Roan’s mother, a Slytherin noble among the socialites outside in the Wizarding World, Queen Nia adopted Echo and gave her the family surname which Echo wore with pride.

Roan was the black sheep of the Azgeda clan, a powerful family of pure-blooded wizards rivaled only by the Griffins and the Northwoods. He may have been his mother’s natural born child, but that never meant he was loved by her. Echo seemed to have usurped his place in that regard.

“GRYFFINDOR!” The hush that followed that proclamation is jarring. No one spoke. None of the Slytherins said a word. If anything, he heard hissing. Funny, he thought, that matched with the snake. The Gryffindors were rapturous, moments after collecting themselves, cheering for Roan as he walked slowly to the crimson and burgundy banners above his House. He looked paler than Headless Nick.

“Blake, Bellamy!” Before he even told his legs to begin walking, he’s there. On the chair, in front of the hundred first years who have or have yet to be Sorted. He felt sweaty and smoothed his curly hair before rubbing his hands on his robes. Bellamy searched for Clarke’s face and found her, with her blonde hair still nestled in that crown of a wild braid, curls askew. Her eyes shined and she smiled at him, she looked so hopeful. And he wanted her to be. Because they would be in Slytherin and remain friends throughout the years.

Together. Not just because they were friends already, but because they would become family. And Bellamy wanted that more than anything in the world.

The Sorting Hat talked to him. And he responded. But this wasn't a conversation that could be heard by any passersby. It was all happening inside of his mind, the Hat’s voice reverberating all over his skull.

“No.”

“Huh?”

“It’s not the place for you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The roof that you want over your head.”

“Slytherin.”

“A pit of vipers is no place for the likes of you.” The Sorting Hat cackled, as if the idea of sorting him in Slytherin was so ridiculous, so uncanny, that it might as well be written as a comedy. “Trust me, kid. Try another.”

“But…” Bellamy gritted through his teeth. “…it’s what I want.”

“And we always get what we want.” The Hat guffawed, “Is that the way of it now?”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“What gave it away?”

“You’re a hat.”

“A rather handsome hat, if I might add.”

“Stop it.” He felt his body shake just now, whether with rage or fear, he didn't know. But he knew he wasn't ready to lose the first friend he’s ever made. He wasn't ready to lose Clarke. “Just say the name.”

“I may be old, lad.” The Sorting Hat chuckled, the vibrations tingling the back of Bellamy’s neck, “But I am never wrong when it comes to sniffing out a lie.”

“I want this.” Bellamy confirmed once again. He’s grinding his teeth now, annoyed at the voice in his head. “You have to say it. It’s where I want to be.”

“You don’t know what you want.”

“SAY IT!”

“A path has been chosen for you.” The Hat said, “Without you even knowing it. Stop being blind.”

“I’m not blind.” Bellamy sought out the memory of Clarke surrounded by fireflies in the dark again, her words of family beckoning to him. The ocean breeze cooling the air. “Please. She’s my friend.”

“She will not be the last friend you make in this place.”

“She knows me.”

“Knowing what you believe in and knowing what you know are two different things.”

“I’ve got dreams.”

“We all have dreams, lad. How we reach them is another conversation altogether.”

“I’m clever.”

“Aye, you are.” The Sorting Hat encouraged. “And brave. And honest. And loyal. And just.”

“I’m not.”

“You have a strong heart lad,” It looked ready to speak his mind. “You’ll do well there.”

“I won’t.”

“Trust me, you will.” The Sorting Hat said before taking in a deep breath. “There’s a lion in you yet.”

Bellamy closed his eyes when the Sorting Hat yelled: “GRYFFINDOR!” The cheers, same as Roan, were rapturous. Fists pounding on the table. Feet stomping the floor. When he opened them, Clarke refused to look back at him. She bit a quivering lip and attempted a smile, but even from where he stood he could tell she was upset.

He joined Roan at the Gryffindor table, withstanding the rough clapping of hands on his shoulders, but feeling empty. There had been numbness on the inside, but not the outside. He and Roan sat, side by side, neither looking nor speaking to one another. Bellamy wondered if Kane would be proud of this.

It was a while before he could bear to look at the gaggle of first years that are moving up the lines. Clarke caught his eye at last, and while the disappointment still sticks there in her features, she smiled at him. And he couldn’t help himself from smiling back at her. They still had each other. They were still friends. And that was all that mattered.

“We’re purebloods” Clarke told him when the two of them were leaving the Hogwarts Express and dragging their trunks to Hagrid and the carriages that lead to the boats. He told her about Kane being his father and how he introduced him to magic. Bellamy told her his mother passed when he was born, keeping the secret of her and Octavia locked inside. “Remember that, if nothing else.”

The Sorting Hat barely touched the crown of golden hair on her head before shrieking out: “SLYTHERIN!” Bellamy looked to be the only Gryffindor at the table clapping his hands and cheering for her. Clarke beamed at him and bowed her head towards him before rushing off to the Slytherins she so desperately sought. They celebrated when she reached them, relieved that yet another powerful wizarding family remained loyal to the purity that only greenness could offer in Hogwarts.

Bellamy saw Echo lean in towards Clarke, whispering something to her. Clarke’s face, once smiling with joy, etchings of tears at the corner of her eyes, disintegrated. Not all at once. Not fast and over in a blink. But slowly, a realization of something being told to her. Of an unspoken truth finally being voiced.

Clarke looked at him. She lacked the smiling, lacked the laughter. Bellamy’s own smile withered away, and the slimy thing he predicted that crept underneath Echo’s face finally began to come to light. A pit formed in his stomach at the sight of Clarke’s new gaze at him. It was a void, so deep and dark that a stone could be thrown and not a single sound heard, validating its existence.

There was no warmth anymore. No hungry princess underneath willing to share her sweets and her magic and her stories with him. It was a look of complete and utter disgust. She looked at him like he was nothing but a pest that needed to be stomped on. There was rage now and there was hatred. Clarke looked away from him, at anything else that wasn't him. Bellamy kept looking at her.

They passed each other when it was finally time for the students to finally be put to bed, Bellamy moved towards her. Concern on his face, a sense of confusion in his heart. Clarke saw him approaching and started to walk away from him with the other Slytherins, towards the dungeon dorms.

“Clarke-” Bellamy began.

“How could you!” Clarke’s voice quivered with rage.

“I tried to tell the Sorting Hat-”

“I trusted you!”

“I’m sorry!”

“You lied to me.”

“I told him I wanted Slytherin-”

“You? In Slytherin?” Her laughter had been as cruel as it was loud. “What a joke!”

Bellamy bristled at that. “Whatever Echo told you about me isn’t true.”

“Really?” Clarke challenged him, turning to face him as some of her fellow Slytherins stopped nearby to observe. “So Kane isn’t your real family?!”

“He isn’t.” Bellamy admitted, suddenly ashamed for keeping it secret. But he didn't understand why she was so angry at him about it.

“Just found you on the streets.”

“He took me in. Gave me a home-”

“More importantly, he got you here.” Clarke ignored him and turned away, eager to escape. “I know what you are.”

“I’m your friend!” Bellamy reached for her arm, but it was the worst thing he could’ve done.

“DON’T TOUCH ME!” She screeched, twisting her arm away from him as if he were electricity and she the fish in the river. “Don’t you EVER touch me!”

“Clarke-” Bellamy looked shocked. He hadn’t meant to hurt her, hadn’t meant to grab so hard.

“You filthy Mudblood.” Clarke whispered with as much venom as she could muster. Bellamy realized now what it had been that made him the rodent to the snake she emulated. The viper that she sought to be. “Stay away from me.”

The Slytherins around them sneered at him after that, jeering at him for what she said.

“Muggleborn.”

“Keep the dirt in your veins.” Echo sneered.

“Non-Maj.”

“Obliviate yourself.” Clarke was gone by the time Bellamy realized what it all meant.

He found his way to the Gryffindor boy’s dormitory and then realized he didn’t want to be here. Bellamy didn’t want to be anywhere. He wanted Kane to read him books again. Wanted the paper figures to come to life and reenact something truly spectacular to behold. He wanted his mother to hug him and hold him close, whispering how proud she was of him. He wanted Octavia, on his back, as he gave her piggy back rides around their dirty, awful flat. He wanted the Clarke he met on the train, before she knew everything about him. Not the Clarke that talked to him just now.

He stripped out of his robes, save for his boxers, and buried himself under the covers. Eager for sleep to wash over him, to cleanse of this night that began with such a marvelous day.

Then came the sniffling. A quiet kind of crying. At first Bellamy thought it was himself doing the crying. But it wasn’t. The tears came from the bed beside him. When he pulled his head out to look, he recognized Roan Azgeda’s long hair hanging from the side of the bed. His entire skinny form, hidden beneath the blankets, shaking. He looked like a jostling bag of bones.

“Hey,” Bellamy croaked, his own grief still fresh, and he left his bed to kneel beside Roan’s. He kept his voice low, “You doing okay, there?”

Roan didn’t answer. If anything, he cried harder. Bellamy hesitantly held out his hand and clasped it on his shoulder, the same way Kane had done for him. He gripped it firmly and kept it there. He wasn't leaving anytime soon, so he might as well stay.

“You don’t have to tell me.” Bellamy reassured the crying boy, trying hard to believe it himself. He willed his own tears to remain deep down in his face. “I just want you to know that I’m here.”

The skinny boy with long hair started to calm down, his breathing shallow and silent.

“I’m here to listen.” He added uncertainly, “If you need someone.”

Roan’s quiet voice crept up from the covers at last: “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

Neither of them spoke for quite some time after that. Until one of them broke.

“Me neither.” Bellamy responded, “You’re not the only one feeling that way.”

“I feel so lost.” Roan whimpered.

“Hang in there.” He said this with as much conviction as he could, trying to recall the Clarke of old who showed him how to call the cool, ocean breeze from his wand. Who called him friend. “We’ll get through this.”

“You too?”

“Me too.”

“Will you lot shut the hell up!” A loud voice cut through the two of them and caused Roan to rise from the covers, eyes still bloodshot red. Bellamy turned to the source of noise that disrupted them. “Some of us are trying to sleep here!” Murphy, it had to be. One of the boys warned him about this one when he finally reached the Gryffindor Common Room.

“I’m sorry.” Roan whispered, ashamed that he’d been caught.

“Boo-hoo!” Murphy jumped out of his bed, hair all spiky. Lean and mean, with an attitude to boot. Bellamy decided that he would not like this boy. Not now. Not ever. “I can’t sleep without my night light. Boo-hoo!” He did a poor imitation of a crying baby. “Boo-hoo!”

The other boys were beginning to wake now. Grumbling. Angry that their sleep had just been ruined.

“Come on, Murphy…”

“Can’t this wait until morning?”

“We’ve all got classes!”

“What’s all this about?”

“Don’t blame me!” Murphy looked every inch the bully. He sneered at Roan and Bellamy and pointed his bony finger. “These two idiots are the ones crying in the middle of the night, making all this racket."

“Cut it out, Murphy.” Nathan Miller, the boy who warned Bellamy of Murphy, warned. He was the only other boy moving. Miller stood near Roan’s bed, protectively. “Leave it alone.”

“Oh, are you defending them?” Murphy turned his malice towards Miller, if Bellamy didn’t know any better. He’d have thought Murphy was sorted into the wrong House. Slytherin suited him better. He could be friends with people like Echo and Clarke. “I should’ve expected this. Can’t keep your eyes off us boys, can you?”

Miller surged forward towards him, shoulders bristling. Before Bellamy held onto him, hand on shoulder. He pulled him back. “Wait.”

“And you!” Murphy turned to Bellamy. “Cheering for a Slytherin of all things!”

Bellamy moved in front of Roan and Miller, his fists clenching at his sides.

“And now you’re helping another.” Murphy inched closer to him, the other first year boys in the dorm stayed in their beds, watching. Waiting. “Even after all the things they said to you.”

Bellamy’s breathing quickened. He began to take in air through his nostrils now. Felt them flare up.

“What happened?” Murphy teased, “Did your Muggle balls drop off-”

He never expected his first fight to begin with a headbutt of all things. But Bellamy hadn't been one for fancy things or ‘pardons’ anymore. He wasn't a pureblood like any other wizards and witches he could name.

Bellamy rammed his forehead into Murphy’s chest, bringing him down to the ground. And then pounced on him, with both his hands around his throat. Had he thrown fists, the older Gryffindors would hear. And he couldn't have that. So Bellamy tightened his hold on Murphy’s throat, choking him.

Miller tried pulling him off, Roan called for him to stop. The other boys began stirring in their beds, frightened by what they were seeing. But Bellamy refused to let up. He stood his ground, every muscle he believed himself to have, taut with tension. Still, Bellamy refused to let go. Murphy tapped out, his skin purpled. The veins in his forehead bulged underneath the skin.

Bellamy released him so that Murphy could gasp for air, even cry for it. No one spoke. There were no longer any sounds in the first year dorm save for that of Murphy's coughing, the massaging of his throat. There were tears in his eyes. He refused to look Bellamy in the face.

“If anyone here in first year-” Bellamy looked around at every one of the boys in the room whose eyes were on him “-ever tries to bring up my blood status again.” He cracked his knuckles and tightened them into fists, “Or hurts a fellow Gryffindor for fun…”

They backed away from Bellamy, every one of the boys scooting farther and farther into their beds, when he advanced towards the center of the room.

“They’ll answer to me.”

The silence returned now, bigger than ever. The first year boy's dormitory looked fraught with darkness, the moon from the window bathed him in silvery light.

“Got it?”

Bellamy couldn't keep track of the number of heads who nodded, but he was certain Murphy had been one of them.


	4. Devil's Memento

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke remembers what happened.
> 
> "Devil Devil" by MILCK

Clarke had been eight years old when her mother showed her the memory. 

The pensieve located in the catacombs beneath Griffin manor emitted a misty vapor. Clarke had first thought the steam coming from the basin at the center of the cobble-stoned floor was smoke and she started to feel excited. Her father had barbecued them sausages and brisket a few weeks ago. The thought of it happening again made her salivate. 

He had laid out the meat on an iron wrought rack in their backyard veranda. Jake Griffin conjured flames from the tip of his yew and arbor bound wand and snaked them around the grill in droves of various kinds of birds made from flames. Eagles. Falcons. Flamingos. Sparrows. Penguins. Harpies. Cardinals. Orioles. Blue Jays. Even a Dodo, long extinct. 

As the fatty meat hissed and crackled, the three of them cheered into the night before digging in.

But then her mother began tracing the runes on her arm. Dipping a quill in the inkwell she brought down with her and started to sketch glyphs and calligraphies all over Clarke’s left arm. She raised her eyebrows at her mother and giggled. They’ve never done this before. It was new and exciting.

Clarke winced as the sharpness of the feather’s point scratched into her skin. Firm, but slow. 

“You will see.” Abigail Griffin whispered to her in the dark, blowing gently on the markings she had drawn on her daughter’s flesh, willing them to dry. “I need you to see.”

“See what?” Clarke whispered back. This was the most fun she’d had with her mother in a long time. Most of the time she was either too busy to spend time with her or too tired after work, too annoyed to be bothered by her mischief. But she treasured these rare moments. When it was just the two of them. Especially when they conspired to surprise her father.

Her mother didn’t respond. 

“Are we surprising father again?” 

“No Sweet Pea,” Abby sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I’m showing you something.”

“What is it?” Clarke asked. “What are you showing me?” 

“The truth.” 

“The truth about what?”

“About why I’m always hard on you.” Her mother tucked a strand of blonde hair behind Clarke’s ear and it was there, in the lowly dimmed lights of the crypt’s torches, that she saw. Clarke saw her mother was crying. Her lips were trembling. “About why our family is so important to me.” 

“Mother…” Clarke quietly said, brushing the tears from her mother’s cheek. She swallowed the lump that began to form in her throat as if it were a bezoar. “…you’re not hard on me.”

“I am.”

“You’re not.” She really was. But Clarke didn’t want her to hear that now. “Maybe sometimes.”

Her mother let out a watery chuckle. She gripped Clarke’s hands back in hers and squeezed hard, she brought them to her lips and kissed them fiercely. “I do that because I love you.”

Clarke nodded. She understood. Even if it did hurt whenever she was on the receiving end of her mother’s sharp lectures and, she shifted from one foot to another, even the back of her hand. 

“And I love your father.” Abby smiled. Even in the dark, such a thing didn’t lose its luster. "Very much."

“We love you too.” 

“He can’t know about this,” Clarke felt her mother turn her face with her hands to face her. “Do you hear me, Sweet Pea? He can never know.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because it would upset him,” Her mother began leading her towards the pensieve. Their footsteps echoed in the darkness, surrounded by the crypts and tombs of ancestors long dead. “He wouldn’t want me showing you this.”

“Why?” 

“Clarke-”

“Tell me!” She insisted, tugged her arm from her mother’s grasp. “I want to know.” 

“I promised him I never would.” 

“You did?”

“I swore on Salazar’s name.” That always meant it was a serious promise. “That I never would.”

Neither of them said anything after that. They stood there, a foot apart. Surrounded by the quiet. 

“Is it…” Now Clarke began to feel nervous, the steam from the basin in the room now beginning to feel ominous by the second. Even the damp cold around them felt eerie and strange. “…scary?”

“The truth can be frightening at times.”

“Is that why you did all of these?” Clarke gestured at the markings on her left arm. “What are they?” 

“They are bindings.” Her mother ran her fingers over the runes she made, “They will link you to the subject of the memory I will be showing you. My memory.” 

Her mother began leading her again, closer towards the pensieve. 

“Your memory?” 

“This happened to me long ago,” Abigail replied softly. “Long before your father and I met.” 

“Really?” 

“You will see what I saw. Hear what I heard.” Clarke felt her mother’s fingers dig into her skin, tightening. She wanted to tell her that hurt. But she wanted to be brave now. “Feel what I felt.” 

“How will I hide that I know?” She asked her mother. Her father tended to peek into her mind whenever she was incredibly upset, too distraught to talk. It’s happened before. “From father?” 

“I will teach you how.” 

“He’ll find out that you broke your promise.” Clarke said. “He’ll see that you showed me this.” 

“Trust me, Sweet Pea.” Abigail combed her hair back and gently submerged her face beneath the cloudy fumes of the basin below. Clarke felt her face break the thinly veiled surface. “He won’t.”

They dragged her mother through the leaves on the forest floor. The trees towered over them all, like obelisks camouflaged in the changing colors of autumn. The school children from the neighboring town who found her there, shrieking with laughter and squealing with delight. She had been twirling around chains of leaves she plucked from the trees, as if it were a kite she was flying around with a string. Only she lacked the string. She was playing the wind with her fingers.

“Freak!”

“Weirdo!”

“You disgusting little witch!” 

“You’re the devil!” 

“We’ll show you!” 

The whole time they were dragging the memory of her mother, Clarke felt them dragging her as well. Smelled the earthy scent of the nature around her, heard the sadistic laughter and bitter insults, and felt the pain of being pulled against her will. Felt the fear her mother felt, the shame.

Abigail Griffin had been eight years old when she first saw the cruelty of those who feared the unknown. Who despised those who were different. And weird. And unbecoming of normal people. She had lived on the edge of the hamlet with her mother, who Clarke had only ever known as Nana, away from the rest of the villagers. They were always ostracized by the others. Always the center of nasty rumors and painful pranks pulled on them. Their cottage home always vandalized.

But this was the first time the prejudice, born from fear and ignorance, lead to physical violence. 

The children tied her to a sycamore tree in the woods behind her home. They used some of the boys’ leather belts as rope and strung her against the bark. Abby never quite got the number right, how many there were that did this. They always kept multiplying whenever she returned to this memory. But it wasn’t just the boys. There were girls as well. And they lined themselves up. 

“Please!” Clarke felt the same words her mother said all those years ago slipping out of her own lips, her own tongue. “Let me go! Don’t hurt me!” She saw the boys and girls bend to the ground.

They began picking up rocks. 

“I won’t do it again, I swear!” Her mother screamed. “I’ll leave! I won’t come back, I promise!”

They began exchanging with one another. Some settling for bigger stones, trading away the smaller ones. Like they were Galleons. And Sickles. And Knuts. As if the pain they brought was bought. 

“Please don’t!” Her mother wailed. She screamed. She begged. Groveled. Chanted. “PLEASE!”

The children began throwing. Each rock that broke her mother’s flesh was accompanied with not only the white-hot flashes of pain and injury, but the sound of their laughter. Of children’s laughter. 

Clarke felt it all. Felt her skin come apart in sequences, felt the gashes opening in her flesh. The blood. There was so much blood and tears that ran down her face, she couldn’t tell which was which. It was all salt. All bitter and inorganic and cruel. She screamed louder. And louder. Louder.

Her mother pulled her from the pensieve. Clarke was still screaming, still crying. Her entire body was shaking, she couldn’t stop the tears from falling. And she was hyperventilating. Trying so desperately to suck in more air through her mouth. Her nose. Her teeth. Abby held her in her arms. 

“Momma!” Clarke choked out. Clawing desperately at her mother’s robes, “Please God! No! Momma!” 

Abigail didn’t say anything. Clarke couldn’t even see her because she was clutching her from behind. Her torso against her back. She tried to find words to say. To comfort them. 

“I’m sorry.” That was all that she could manage. Clarke cried even harder after saying it. “I’m so sorry, Mother.” Now she felt her mother shaking, felt her crying behind her. She reached back for her. Grabbed as much of Abigail Griffin as she could and hugged her backwards. “I’m sorry.” 

“Your grandmother found me after they finished.” Her mother choked out. “I was nearly dead.”

“Oh, Mother…”

“I almost died. Nana fixed my bones and stitched my skin. I don’t have a single scar from that day.” 

“You don’t?” Clarke whispered, she had begun to calm down. She felt her tears being wiped away.

“Not on the outside.” Her mother replied, resting a hand on her chest. “Some scars are inside me.”

She stared at the pensieve that did this to her. The memory that did this to her mother. The horror of everything she experienced too stifling to put to words. 

“There are some wounds that will never heal, Sweet Pea.” Abigail whispered. “Not ever.” 

"I'm sorry that happened to you." 

"Don't be." Her mother rubbed her shoulders now, comfortingly gentle. "Before I met your father, I made a promise to myself all those years ago."

"What did you promise?"

"That if I ever had a child of my own, and they reached 8 years of age, I would show them what happened."

“Why would they do such a thing?” Clarke could feel a rage she never knew existed boiling out of her. "How could they hurt you like that?" It was as if her chest were a cauldron and the mixture inside overflowing was her hate. “Who were they? Where are they?” 

“They are far away now." Her mother said in a soothing voice, trying her best to calm her. "And they were Muggles.”

“Normal children?” 

“Dirt-veined Mudbloods who didn't know a lick of magic.” Her mother spat, as if the very idea of normalcy were a curse never meant to be spoken near others. “Not worth the spells off our wands.” 

“Why did they attack you?” 

“Because I was different.” 

“Father says that everyone is different.” 

“Your father has always been too soft.” Abigail turned Clarke to face her, both their faces a mess, red-cheeked and tear splotched. “And I fear you have inherited that same softness.”

“I have?” 

“You have. But I will remedy that.” 

Clarke didn't know how to respond to that. 

“Those children attacked because they feared me. They feared the strength I had and the power I would use against them. They feared the greatness that’s inside my blood. Same as yours.” 

“Mine?”

“We are descended from Salazar Slytherin, Sweet Pea. The greatest of Hogwarts' Founders.” 

Clarke looked at the reverence on her mother’s face. The peace that overtook the trauma now shared between the two of them. Whenever she spoke of Slytherin, she always sounded happier. Fuller with life. More content with everything around her. And Clarke loved the idea of something doing that for her. Which is why she loved the Great House. 

“You will go to Hogwarts and you will thrive. You will restore the glory our House deserves.”

“I will.” Clarke promised. The fervor of her words growing bolder by the second. “For our family.”

“The deeds you accomplish there will be your destiny.” Abigail replied. “Your birthright.” 

“I hate them.” The blonde girl growled, “For what they did to you. To us. I’ll make them all pay.”

“No-”

“Those Mudbloods!” Clarke spat. Trying as hard as she could to channel every awful, negative thing that the memory brought to her family. 

“Clarke, you will do no such thing.” Her mother lectured. 

“Why not?” 

“Because you have to become smarter and grow up stronger. Be more than what you are now.”

“But I want to hurt them back." Clarke insisted angrily. "I want to hurt them for hurting you.”

“You will, Sweet Pea.” Abigail stroked her daughter’s hair. “There will be a time for that.”

“When?” Clarke asked. 

“When the time is right.” Her mother replied. “But for now, you must pretend to care for them.”

“Pretend?”

“For your father.” 

"But for how long?"

"For as long as he's around." 

Clarke surged upward then. Her head leaving her pillow and her body nearly leaving the bed. Her face sleek with sweat, her hair and bed soaked with it. She ran her hands to wipe the moisture off her neck and felt them return shaking, clammy. The Slytherin girl’s first year dormitory dimly lit by doldrums of greenish hue from the domed ceiling. Her breathing ragged and shallow, her chest rising and falling underneath it all.

“Nightmare?” Echo’s voice quipped lazily in the bed next to her. Above her, dangled a spider she levitated with her hand. She jabbed her angel oak wand and then one of the spider’s legs tore off. "Can't stand those."

“Can I try?” Clarke whispered back. Fascinated by the girl’s actions next to her. 

Echo flashed her a feral smile. Hungry and jagged. Like the wild borne monsters hidden away in the Forbidden Forest. She floated the spider to her. "Be my guest."


	5. Growth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy sees that some seeds are worth planting.
> 
> "Help" by Howie Day

Many of the first-years boys in Gryffindor steered clear of him.

To be honest, Bellamy expected as much after what he had done to Murphy. No one spoke to him and almost all of them threw mutinous glances his way when they thought he wasn’t looking. He knew they talked behind his back, imagined the poisonous rumors they were spreading. The plots against him.

But nothing they did could ever match the solitude he felt whenever he passed Clarke in the halls.

The girl he befriended on the train was gone. The blonde-haired tempest that replaced her was single-handedly thrashing the other Houses when it came to House points. Transfiguration, Charms, Potions, History of Magic, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Astronomy and Herbology. All the mandatory classes that first-years had to take, she excelled in. Slytherin was rising thanks to her.

Answering every question, acing every examination, and handing in every assignment weeks ahead of time only to start on another. Gryffindors only shared classes with Slytherin students for Potions, Transfiguration, Herbology, and Defense Against the Dark Arts. So he witnessed her brilliance first hand in those subject areas. Saw first hand how far ahead she was of everyone else.

The other classes he left to his own imagination. But he could tell it was more of the same.

She didn't spare him the time of day. Didn’t acknowledge when he entered a room or glance his way whenever he fumbled around with materials. Bellamy did catch Clarke smirk whenever he attempted to answer a question in class, only to be way off the mark. Some how that made it all worse.

His Professors were understanding of his plight. Or well, they tried to be. The Muggleborn orphan adopted by an Auror. No clue of what to expect, oblivious to the inner and outer workings of magic. New to this world.

Only Pike, Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts, seemed to give him the time of day.

But even with the extra opportunities given to him, Bellamy still struggled. Still got things wrong.

Bellamy caught Murphy sneering at him whenever he made Mbege and Atom laugh using cruel jokes at the expense of others or whenever he wowed his fellow first years with new packages he received. Apparently his parents were loaded. Strange how quickly the others forgot how much of an ass the thug really was.

Only one Gryffindor didn’t seem to mind his company. Only one Gryffindor sat with him at the far end of the Gryffindor table to eat. Only one Gryffindor didn’t care about who he was. Or where he came from.

Roan.

For some reason, the skinny long-haired first year appreciated the conversation the two of them had that first night in the dorm. The boy was just as much of an outcast as he was. A Slytherin traitor thought to be Gryffindor infiltrator. Always judged, never given a chance to be known. They were kindred spirits in that department. The other boys sneered at them, made fun of them.

Bellamy couldn’t just fight them all, even when the upperclassman and faculty weren’t looking.

But Roan remained by his side. He was struggling just as much as him in the classes they shared.

“I thought you grew up on magic?” Bellamy asked, as the pair of them poured over Potions notes.

“I did.” Roan replied, scratching away yet another error on the scroll of parchment in front of him.

“You told me your family brewed potions in the kitchen cauldron.”

“All the time.”

“Performed spells, transformed rubbish, raised a beast or two in your backyard ravine-”

“Is there a point to all of this?”

“How do you NOT remember the recipe for a forgetfulness potion?” Bellamy rifled through more pages in his Potions textbook. Circling half of a paragraph with his own quill for equal measure.

“I never said I paid attention to any of it.” Roan’s spilled half his inkwell on the paper. “Bugger.”

“You don’t remember?”

“More like I didn’t care.”

“How can you not care about magic?” Bellamy’s quill broke in two after pressing too hard while writing the final sentence to his second paragraph. He muttered a ‘shit’ before saying: “It’s magic.”

“If you’ve seen all the things that I’ve seen, you’d agree.” Roan handed him the quill he was using just now and moved towards his satchel to find another spare. “Trust me. Magic gets old real fast.”

“Is it stir three times clockwise that comes next or the adding two Valerian sprigs step?”

“I put down: adding four mistletoe berries to the mortar and grinding it with a pestle.”

“That’s from part two! We’re supposed to finish part one first!”

“Merlin’s beard.” Roan rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of his hands. “Are you serious?”

“Yes!” Bellamy exclaimed. He looked to the window in the Gryffindor Common Room. It looked dark outside.

“Blimey, I’m knackered.”

“You think?”

“What time is it, do you reckon?”

“Way past your bedtime.”

“Sod off.”

“You first.”

It had taken weeks before Roan managed to come out of his shell. Bellamy still remembered the crying boy on his first night away in Hogwarts. For the first couple of days, it was Bellamy who did most of the talking. Most of the joking. Roan just watched him. Frightened almost. As if anything he did would ruin whatever it was the two of them had.

Bellamy never gave up. He kept trying. Even when he felt stupid half the time trying to make conversation about magical things he knew absolutely nothing about. Even when he brought up the Muggle world. Even when he made an absolute fool of himself acting around about. Even when he didn't know what it took to keep a friend. To get them to stay.

He kept trying. And trying. And trying.

The two of them found their way eventually.

It had been an awkward exchange of poorly executed, cornily delivered puns that made them click.

“Thank you.” Roan had said, all those nights ago. After they wrestled out yet another disagreement about acid pops vs sour patch kids.

“For what?” Bellamy asked. The two of them had accidentally thrown Murphy's pillow outside the window during the scuffle. Neither of them seemed to care.

“Teaching me how to be brave.”

Bellamy managed to put Roan in a headlock before the pair of them heard the laughter. It was soft, started off as a snort that escalated into full on mirth. They turned their heads to look at the source amidst their playful wrestling and found a girl on the armchair near the fireplace. She had a Daily Prophet in front of her as she watched all their shenanigans from behind her thickly-framed glasses.

Her name was Harper McIntyre. And she was the shyest girl from the group of first years in Gryffindor. The quietest. The other girls said that she was the youngest of three daughters. Her older two sisters already graduated and were said to have been beautiful and popular during their time here. It was a legacy that Harper struggled to follow.

Several of the first-year girls didn’t take kindly to that. Especially the ones from the other Great Houses. They didn’t like how much weight the McIntyre name carried these days. And they especially didn’t like how this mousy, socially awkward, bespectacled girl supposedly carried the beauty gene.

Bellamy heard that the Slytherin girls were especially nasty to her. He wondered if Clarke was one of them. The bullies who made this poor girl's life a living hell day after day. Bellamy hoped she wasn’t. He didn't understand why he cared. Clarke hated him now. Wanted nothing to do with him. It didn't matter what he thought. It never would.

Harper was always reading something. She seemed to be kind, smart, and equipped with a soft-spoken voice. He was pretty sure she was one of the reasons why Gryffindor was even in the race for House points. She was one of the very few that participated in class, however rare those instances were day to day. But when she did, she was usually correct.

Which was why her laughter came as such a surprise to them. Harper was always alone. Like him and Roan.

There was never an opportunity for her to laugh. And if there was, very few were there to hear it.

She seemed to realize that they caught her watching and darted her head back behind the paper.

“He started it.” Roan supplied weakly, pushing himself out of Bellamy’s hold. “Just saying.”

“Yeah right.” Bellamy replied, giving him a light shove back. “Trying to make us fail on purpose.”

“I forgot the ingredients!”

“Steps, dummy, the essay is about the steps!”

There’s been no answer from the armchair. Harper had gone silent. Roan and Bellamy walked towards her, eyeing each other carefully. Had they done something wrong? What gives?

“Hey,” Roan asked, his concern showing. “You alright?"

Harper stood up and folded the Daily Prophet mechanically. Her cheeks looked bright red and she fumbled for her rabbit slippers, the ones with floppy ears that squeaked when they were worn. The glasses on her face, thick and sturdy, were askew and she rearranged it in a rush. Giving them both a look, opening her mouth to speak, before closing it shut and rushing off upstairs to the girl’s dorm.

“What do you reckon we did?” Bellamy inquired softly.

“I don’t know.” Roan said with a shrug.

“We’re not good at making friends, are we?”

“Apparently not.”

“Maybe Miller can fill us in?”

“Oh, you mean Nathan “I-can’t-talk-to-you-two-when-others-are-around”? That Miller?”

“Pretty sure he prefers Nate.”

“I thought out of all the others, he would be different.” Roan said angrily. Moving back to the table they were occupying to pack up his books and scrolls of parchment messily into his satchel.

“He needs to fit in with the others.” Bellamy responded. Packing his own materials into his rucksack. “You know that.”

“He WANTS to be just like everyone else.”

“Roan-”

“I just thought that after our first night, he’d be with us.”

“He is with us.”

“Not in public. Not where others can see.”

“Does it really matter?”

“It does to me!” Roan snapped, storming off towards the stairs. “And it should for you!”

Bellamy chased after the boy, grabbing his arm and forcing him to look back. “It shouldn’t.”

Roan tried shrugging him off, but Bellamy persisted.

“It shouldn’t because as long as we have him, he’s with us. No matter how short the time is.”

Roan stared at him for the longest time. Before shaking his head and pulling his arm out of his grasp. He’d gone up the stairs. Bellamy sighed before following him up, the boys’ dormitory. It wasn't long before the two of them were dead to the world. Usually it took a while with Murphy’s snoring. They managed to pin the crime of his missing pillow on the poltergeist Peeves before his parents managed to send him a replacement.

The next day, Roan asked Fox and Monroe where Harper took her lunches. They were the only first year Gryffindor girls who made efforts to converse with her. When he got his answer, he grabbed Bellamy by the collar of his robes and dragged him down to a grassy knoll near the Great Lake. Harper sat there beneath a tree, eating a steak and kidney pie while reading Tales of Beedle the Bard.

Roan and Bellamy plopped themselves next to her, startling the girl out of her literary coma. Harper’s eyes grew wide behind her glasses, not sure of how to act to this disturbance in her daily routine.

“So, here’s the thing.” Roan began, taking a massive bite out of his self-made concoction of fish and chips and potato salad trapped in a massive rye wrap. He struggled to scarf it all down, the sight looked absolutely disgusting. Roan thumped his own chest and Bellamy helped pound his fist against his back so that he didn't choke to death. Harper watched them, the whole time, frozen and clinging to the book on her chest as if it were the only lifeline around. The whole situation drowned by the minute.

“Sorry.” Bellamy explained with a weak grin. “He isn’t usually this stupid.”

There are a few seconds of horrible choking and gagging noises before Roan managed to choke it all down, the disastrous first bite. He managed to complete the sentence he originally started: “We’re rubbish.”

“At everything.” Bellamy clarified.

“Charms.”

“Potions.”

“Transfiguration.”

“Astronomy.”

“You name it.”

“We suck at it.”

Harper still watched them both, waiting. Her book bent slightly from the pressure of her fingers.

“Help us, Harper.” Bellamy had meant for it to be a question, but it came out as a statement.

“You’re our only hope.” Roan made it sound more dramatic than it was. He even pretended to faint, like those southern belles from those American movies Bellamy told him about.

But no, they were rubbish. And they didn’t want to fail. Certainly not out of magical Hogwarts.

There had been an awkward silence. One that eventually broke when Bellamy crunched on his corned beef sandwich, less noisily than Roan.

“Did he drink forgetfulness potion?” Harper attempted, her voice sounded soft and slow: “He mixed up both parts.”

It took Bellamy a while to figure out that she had been asking HIM the question and referring to Roan’s incompetence the previous night when they were working.

He barked out laughing.

“He might as well!” Bellamy clutched his stomach, pointing at Roan. “Way off course, boyo!”

Harper chuckled, holding her wrist against her forehead. Sending her glasses askew.

Roan acted indignant, but Bellamy knew just by the motions of his hands it was all in good fun.

“Two against one, eh?” He flicked a fry towards Harper but missed by a mile. It's not even in the same ballpark, not even the same country, not even in the same planetary orbit. “Now it’s a fair fight.”

It doesn’t take long for their duo to turn into a trio after that.

And as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into three months gone by, it became clear to him whenever Harper ambushed Roan and Bellamy in the halls. Her arms hugging their heads together, encircling them from behind. The fact that Harper no longer hid herself away from the rest of the world. She laughed with them. Played games with them. Tutored them when she saw them struggling with their subjects. Mediated them through the good times and the bad. She was still shy at times. Still quiet. Still awkward. But so were they.

So was everyone. So was every eleven year old first year who first began there or continued to begin. Harper had the silent kind of courage, the one that began with inches. All she needed was for someone to give her a chance. And then she blossomed.

He understood now that things were going to be okay. Maybe there was still a home he could build in this place the man who saved him talked so fondly about.

Bellamy reserved a silent thank you in his head for the Sorting Hat's decision.


	6. Daughters Of The Snake

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke and her cronies conspire.
> 
> "Serpents" by Sharon Van Etten

Clarke underestimated the threat of the blood traitor, Harper McIntyre, for far too long.

It was a mistake she vowed to correct before the Thanksgiving feast.

She wouldn’t have noticed if the Gryffindor rival, the only one who contended with her dominance in the classes they shared, stayed invisible. It helped that she was a common sort of thing. Not exactly the prettiest piece of jewelry in the treasure chest, but a few notches above downright ugly.

Quiet and pathetic creatures were not to be feared. Clarke didn’t partake in the subtle knocking down of books after their classes or binding Harper to the toilet next to Moaning Myrtle so she would be forced to hear her crying. She left that grunt work for the grunts. That had always been Echo and the others. But Clarke admitted, Harper's tears were more than satisfying.

Lexa Northwood had been the one to point out the new change, the royal scion of the oldest pureblood family currently out there in the Wizarding World, whose family’s wealth eclipsed both the Griffin and the Azgeda fortunes put together. That said a lot, given the amount they had to spend.

It was natural that she would join Clarke’s inner circle. Echo proved to be a valuable ally, but it always helped to have another providing input on the shots taken towards a common goal. Leadership was a lonely pursuit after all.

The other Slytherin first year girls followed Clarke. That much was clear. And the ones who even thought of voicing displeasure, bringing disorder to their ranks, they were dealt with.

Thanks to Echo and Lexa.

“The half-blood bitch has found herself a pair of cubs.” Lexa drawled when she came to join her friends in the Slytherin Common Room. Echo had been sharpening a Potions knife against a whetstone, the sound of metal scraping against rock echoing in the nearly empty dungeon space. She sat while doing this, rocking the chair back every now and then, near the crackling of the fire.

Clarke leaned forward over open documents about animal anatomy, books borrowed from the school library, towering over a belt with various tools and instruments.

The corpse of a formaldehyde-drenched iguana lay beneath her on the table slab.

She blackmailed a second year Hufflepuff girl named Mel with images of her in the shower, the photos showing her lathering herself with soap, for access to her Potions materials. She was bored with first year lessons and, eager for second year knowledge, hungered for newer, more advanced experiments. Mel fought against it, threatened Clarke. Talked of seniority and all that nonsense. Cursed her and her gang of Slytherin girls.

But she obeyed. They always did in the end. She made sure of it.

Clarke heard the words “savant” and “prodigy” being used to describe her academic performances.

Apparently, the Professors had yet to comprehend just how well-versed she was with magic.

It spoke, and she listened. Magic wrapped around her whenever she willed it to. It was her music.

She didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Clarke just wanted to learn. She was always searching for the next advantage. The next nugget of knowledge that would give her the upper hand.

And most of all, she wanted points for House Slytherin. They were going to win the House Cup.

It would be, in large part, due to her first-year efforts. Which, to Clarke, was worth more than gold.

The blonde-haired girl mumbled out the proper incantations, binding the limbs of the lab subject so that they stretched further and pinned themselves to the table’s wooden surface. Her brows furrowed in concentration, her teeth worrying over her lower lip. She stopped moving her wand.

“What are you going on about?” Clarke asked.

“The blood traitor McIntyre.” Lexa turned to look at Echo. “She’s been tutoring your dear family.”

Metal stopped scraping against stone. Echo's eyes darkened in the shadows of the fire.

“And the Muggleborn as well.” Lexa faced Clarke next. “The one you sat with on the train.”

Clarke clenched her teeth. Of course, it would be him. She thought back to that day on the Hogwarts Express, when the boy took advantage of her kindness and wealth. Hiding the truth, his truth, from her. Typical Muggles. Always trying to worm their way in where they don’t belong.

Bellamy and his stupid freckles, stupid black curls, and stupid brown skin. Who smiled when she told him about her mother. When she confided in him the power of her family and Slytherin and her blood.

To think she ever wanted to see the green crest of Salazar’s snake adorned on his robes.

She couldn’t bear to see it defiled, her mother’s sigil and her grandmothers before her.

He had lied to her face and smiled about it. Wove together sweet words of friendship with her. As if she could ever be friends with the likes of him. Clarke had cried to her father about making new friends, but she hadn’t meant it like this. She wanted those like her. Those pure of blood and magic.

Clarke would make Bellamy pay for that. If it was the last thing she did before the year ended.

She would make him pay for his betrayal.

Clarke would not fall victim to stones like her mother did.

“Is that so?” Echo said in a deathly, quiet voice. She resumed sharpening her Potions knife. Although the sound and the movements amplified from before, twice as loud. “It would be Roan.”

“As if she could do anything to fix their stupidity.” Clarke tittered. She twirled her jagged, weeping willow wand around and between her fingers. “Where was it that you found them?” She included.

“The school library.” Lexa answered, she moved to sit at a nearby table and propped both her legs in a cross on its empty surface. “Saw the three huddled together studying. She giggled by the way.”

“Who?” Echo asked, her voice deadpan, as if she didn’t quite hear what happened. “McIntyre?”

“Yeah.” Lexa leaned her own head and back to let out a disgruntled, disgusted groan. “McIntyre.”

“McIntyre doesn’t giggle.” Clarke snarled. “She cries and hides from us. But she never giggles.”

“You probably misheard.” The legs of Echo’s chair slammed hard against the stone. “That’s all.”

“I don’t mishear things.” Lexa glowered at her. “My hearing is impeccable.”

“It had to have been Roan.” Echo finished sharpening the knife then, ending it all with one loud, final scrape. “I mean look at him. He looks well enough like a girl. Makes sense he’d act like one too.”

“You never cut his hair for him?”

“Queen Nia wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“Thought I’d cut too close to his scalp, draw blood by accident, maybe rip it all off at once.”

“And what did dear, darling Roan think of that?” Lexa smirked.

“Wouldn’t hear of it.” Echo bared her teeth and in the light of the fireplace, surrounded the damp darkness of the Slytherin dungeon. “Hasn’t looked at me the same since the ‘incident’ with the damn dog.”

Lexa shot a glance towards Clarke, disturbed by Echo’s admission. It was an expression of fear.

“He was always weak.” Echo crooned.

Clarke didn’t mind Echo. She was her most loyal enforcer. A mad dog she could set on unruly pawns. She rolled up the sleeves of her olive sweater and walked over towards her. Hand extended.

“Are you finished with that?” Clarke asked patiently. “It’s time for me to begin.”

“Mind the blade.” Echo, ever obedient to her leader, handed it over. Handle first. “It’s sharp.”

Clarke returned to the iguana, hovering over its corpse, she replied: “I don’t mind sharp.”

The first incision severed the throat of the iguana. She exchanged the knife with forceps to peer inside.

“It’s dull that I have a problem with.” Clarke poked and prodded at various tissue in its neck.

She paused every now and then to scratch notes in visual organizers she prepared on parchment with her mockingbird quill.

“Dull ideas and dull lives.” Clarke put the prongs down and then used claw-like pliers to wrench out some flesh from the iguana's throat. “Dull people.”

Lexa and Echo watched their leader drop the meat into a flask of maroon potion already prepped.

The mixture fizzled and popped before turning to amethyst. Clarke smiled ruefully at that.

“Dull McIntyre.” She scribbled a couple more notes before switching back to the knife and sinking it into the abdomen of the iguana with such a force that the loud bang that followed startled Lexa.

But not Echo. If anything, she yearned for it.

“This is something that cannot pass.” Clarke muttered, carving the blade vertically down the chest of the iguana, fighting through bone and tendon closer and closer to the bottom. “We must act.”

“What are you suggesting?” Lexa asked hesitantly. “We go after her? She’s not alone anymore.”

“Witnesses.” Echo agreed, rubbing the back of her neck with zeal. “Those who see are a problem.”

“It’s not like she’ll make a difference.” Lexa took her feet down from her table. “Gryffindor is last in points.”

“Slytherin is in a commanding lead thanks to you.”

“This isn’t something to worry over. McIntyre is nothing, the lion cubs she cares for are nothing.”

“Less than dung if you ask me.”

“You’ve made your feelings on Roan quite clear in the past, Echo. Clarke doesn’t need it now.”

“Hark to the kettle calling the cauldron black.”

“That’s not the point!” Clarke snapped, releasing the knife still embedded in the iguana and slamming her palms on the table, jostling everything on top of it. Lexa and Echo quieted down, watching her warily.

Couldn’t they see? Was she the only one with eyes? McIntyre was a threat. She may not be as much of a challenge as Raven Reyes, the Ravenclaw revolutionary thinking of cheeky and inventive solutions to obstacles and problems that basically short-cutted basic magical principles.

Clarke loathed the smirking brunette dressed in blue whenever they faced off during classes. But she couldn’t help but respect the intelligence she saw brewing in that mind of hers. Reyes was the only other student here in Hogwarts that she knew, for a fact, could challenge her iron-fisted rule.

But nonetheless, Harper McIntyre was there in bronze. Trailing behind the two of them, with capable smarts and consistent marks.

“What do you think will happen when the other Houses see?” Clarke scowled. “That little namby-pamby, goody-two shoes of a book worm helping those two boys out? One of them an orphan! The other a pure-blooded disgrace!”

Lexa and Echo watched her, neither saying anything to spark more of her fury.

Clarke snapped her fingers so that the iguana’s chest and torso opened. Its scaly skin spreading and pinning against the table by unseen nails. The inner workings of the reptile laid bare to them.

She pulled out the knife from where she left it and began slicing apart the lining between the intestines and stomach, grunting as she worked. Her hands slathered by the fluids inside, blackening her pale skin as she worked.

“They will see underdogs working their way up from the muck.”

Clarke separated two pieces of flesh with the knife before pulling out the innards of the iguana.

“They will see hope. They will see competition. They will see resistance.”

She dumped the guts of the reptile into a wooden pail underneath the table with unnecessary force.

“They will see that we are not on top.” Clarke finished by ramming the knife into the iguana’s heart.

The blonde-haired tempest of a girl moved back towards the flames of the fireplace before stopping in the center of the room. She wasn’t close to Lexa, but not so far away from Echo.

She inhaled deeply, waiting a while, before exhaling all the air she held out.

“We will no longer be a House to be feared.” Clarke whispered. “I cannot allow that disrespect.”

“You make it sound as if McIntyre is all the chaos out there in the world.” Lexa stated.

“What else do we call those who aren’t us?” Echo declared.

So that’s where it began, Clarke thought. Bellamy and Roan performed between average and below average in every class they’ve been a part of so far this school year. According to her spies, they kept working at it. Kept studying long into the night. But to no avail. They weren’t worth anything.

Until Madame Hooch’s Flying classes happened in mid-October and Bellamy managed to be the only one to levitate himself on the broomstick higher than any other first-year. Clarke included. She eventually finished higher than him, quickly learning on the fly all the proper forms and disciplines. She prevailed in flight by the end.

But Bellamy had still been the first. It was the only remarkable thing he did since coming here. But then he taught Roan and Harper to rise high on their brooms as well, flying not as high as he did, but high enough to catch up with the Fox and Monroe.

All three laughed. The other two joined in. Three plus two meant five. More than what it used to be.

It began with her, with Harper McIntyre. She caused the spark. The two boys just fanned for the flames.

The fire was only now spreading. Did none of her girls see? Why did no one do a report?

Halloween. That was when she should’ve have seen it coming. Madame Hooch had them pop open the floating pumpkin lanterns she had prepared for them with their wands. Not casting any spells or anything. But jabbing their wands into the lanterns, breaking the pumpkins apart. Bellamy and Roan hadn’t collected nearly as much candy as the rest of their classmates, rewards for popping them in quick succession. But they shared all their earnings with Harper, especially when they saw how few she had collected.

“We need to be smart about this,” Clarke decided, turning to both her friends. They stood up straight, awaiting her orders. “Nothing physical. Those types of scars can always be fixed.”

She then brandished her weeping willow wand and made a violent, slashing motion at the fireplace. The gesture snuffed out the flames so that only embers scattered. Only they didn’t fade away.

The embers remained floating all around, casting their floundering glow into the dark, still bright.

But dim enough to be mistaken for dead.

“We need wounds that will never heal.” Clarke smiled her own kind of feral. “Find me something to use.”


	7. May You Never Lose Your Way

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harper navigates a brave new world.
> 
> "Stand By Me" by Florence + The Machine

Every year brought a new Thanksgiving holiday.

And every year Harper McIntyre gave thanks to all the things in her life that made her feel special.

The dishes prepared for her family’s meal may change, the menu for dinner either rearranged or revamped, from turkey to ham to casserole. But the things she cherished almost always remained.

It had always been the things about her family for which she was thankful.

There was her father. An enormous, grizzly bear of a man with a stout chest and a sturdy frame thick as a tree trunk and a deep, booming voice that could travel across rooms in their farmhouse.

He worked as a lumberjack because he was still a Muggle and, even though he now knew about the world of magic, witches, and wizards, he liked sticking to what he knew. Just in case, he’d say.

Her father also had a bushy beard that he allowed his girls to braid every now and again and always halved the fatty, sizzling sausages off his plate when they ate together during the early hours of family breakfasts. He craved for them but knew just how much Harper loved them. He carried her on his shoulders, lifted her amid crowds to watch the Muggle parades their town sometimes held.

“How are you doing up there?” Her father would ask her from below.

“I can see everything from up here!” Harper laughed back from above.

The man always told her how much he delighted in her laughter. Said it was more fun than greeting the boys his oldest daughters brought home with crushing handshakes, embarrassing all of them.

Harper gave thanks for the life her father provided their family, despite living with four witches.

Then there were her sisters, Roma and Bree, the McIntyre girls the boys pined for during their time in Hogwarts. They were fiercely wild and free-spirited, the spitting images of their mother’s youth.

All the girls had wanted to be like them, Harper couldn’t keep track of the number of friends from different Houses who graced their home during the summers. But they gossiped, laughed, and played.

And even though Harper’s meek attempts to assimilate into their world were rebuffed, sometimes rather rudely, there were other times when Roma and Bree allowed her in. Showed her off to their friends, to all the Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws and Gryffindors who loved her sisters. Roma and Bree dressed her up and did her hair, applied make-up, and tried to make her as beautiful as them.

And Harper loved them both for doing it, even though it wasn’t true. And she knew how ugly she was. She looked at herself in the mirror and tried plucking at the knots of chestnut curls in her hair.

She took off her thickly-framed glasses and attempted, rather blurrily because she was half-blind without them, to see if there were any improvements. Harper rubbed silky spider web lotion on her knobby knees and bony arms, tried to apply mud and mushrooms to her face because she had read about it in the Quibbler once. Roma and Bree found her crying of shame in her room after the massive failure of an experiment and held her as she swore repeatedly to never read another copy.

“Things will be different once you’re older.” Roma had advised wisely. “You’ll see.”

“Our bodies change in more ways than you know.” Bree added. “There’s no need to rush, Harp.”

“That’s disgusting, Bree. You’re not helping.”

“What? The boys certainly notice.”

“I hate boys!” Harper shouted into their interlocked arms, although the sound muffled a bit.

“Well, we all think like that at first.” Roma sighed.

“Trust me, every girl does.” Bree nodded.

“I don’t even know what to do with them.” It was true. Harper didn’t know what clothes to wear or what books boys liked. Because back then that’s what she thought she had to do. Read to them.

To be honest, she still believed that last bit even to this day.

“They don’t even know what to do with us either, Harp.”

“God knows they try their best.”

So, Harper thanked her sisters for never giving up on her and her quirks.

Thanked Roma, the oldest, for bringing her to the Muggle library in town and the many dusty bookstores in Diagon Alley. Thanked middle sister Bree for hexing an ex-boyfriend of hers for poking fun at Harper and dumping him after she and her sisters pawned off an I’m-so-sorry dinner.

Then there was her mother. The witch who accidentally flew her broomstick into a paulownia tree and fell to her apparent death before her father, the lumberjack, caught her.

Who fell in love with a Muggle and, after refusing to Obliviate his memory, was disowned by her own pureblood family. To this day, Harper doesn’t know the names of her grandparents and aunts.

Cooper McIntyre never talked about the life she had led before, to any of her daughters.

Harper thanked whatever power there was, the one looking out for magical and non-magical beings out there around the world, for the woman showing her the magical crops and flowers she grew around the farm, the ones she sold in the markets of Diagon Alley and Herbology classes all over.

For the woman whose daughters would inherit their beauty from. Who held her head as she lay immersed in her newest book, who brushed her hair, and never admonished her for being herself.

And lastly, Harper thanked the compass, which was the family heirloom responsible for her family.

A gift to Cooper from her godmother at the time, dead but still remembered after all these years.

The guardian who never gave up on Harper’s mother even after her banishment. Even after she caught flak for sticking by her goddaughter. The pair of them facing down public outrage for years.

It was an old hunk of metal, this magical object.

The compass had been made from thick, polished silver and contained a piece of obsidian that served as the needle in its center. It was a strange kind of device because it didn’t point north, south, east, or west. Her mother had told her that the compass had pointed to where you belonged.

It pointed towards home.

But Cooper had smashed the compass after her godmother passed away from Dragon Pox.

“Why?” Harper asked when she was eight years old. Her mother curled up with her on the hammock in their front porch, tethered between two brick pillars. “Why did you do that, Ma’?”

“Because I didn’t need it anymore.” Cooper responded. She hugged her daughter even closer.

“She gave that to you as a gift.”

“She did.”

“Before you met Da’.”

“Way before.”

“Didn’t you want to keep it around?”

“I did for a time.” Her mother kissed her on the cheek with a wet, noisy smack. “But not anymore.”

“Was it because she passed?” Harper felt tears form at the corner of her eyes. “That you lost home?”

“Not at all, Sweetie.” Cooper shifted the hammock around, so they could see each other. “No at all.”

“Then why did you do it?” Harper couldn’t stop the tears from falling anymore. Her glasses fogged up from the moisture on her face. She burrowed deeper into her mother’s cashmere blouse. “Why?”

Cooper straightened both their bodies, with their hammock swaying ever in sync with the wind blowing outside, so she could better show her daughter the compass. Its glass face shattered, the silvery metal dented and misshapened. The lifeless obsidian needle still straight in the middle.

Like a dart made from black glass, with one end shorter than the other.

“I smashed this beloved gift because I didn’t need it anymore.” Her mother repeated with a whisper, turning the compass over so Harper could read the note in cursive: may you never lose your way.

“Why not?” Harper asked her mother again.

“Because for the longest time I didn’t know where home was.” Cooper softly said to her. “I never really belonged. My godmother gave this to me after my graduation and guess where it pointed?”

“Where?”

“To Hogwarts, Sweetie. The place where I was leaving.”

“Not to where you were going?”

“I hated where I was going. I didn’t like who I was becoming. That’s why I left on my broomstick.”

“And crashed on top of Da’?”

“And crashed on top of Da’.” Cooper laughed. She planted another noisy kiss on Harper’s cheek.

“You did a good thing.” Harper stated.

“That was a VERY good thing.” The hammock shook from the laughter they shared. “Because then I got to meet Roma. And Bree. And then you.” Her mother tickled her sides for good measure.

“We’re your home now.”

“Exactly.” Cooper replied. “And now that I know where I can find it, with all of you, I’ll never have to wonder whether or not I’m lost ever again.” She tucked away the compass and then fell silent.

The sound of the crickets chirped throughout the summer nighttime air, echoing across their yard.

“I’ll fix it.” The small girl declared from inside her arms.

“What was that?”

“I’ll fix the compass again.” Harper said, wiggling out of her mother’s arms, the hammock moving again because of them, and faced her mother in trademark McIntyre fashion. “I promise you.”

“Sweetie-”

“For Roma and Bree!” She exclaimed to her mother, before pointing to herself, “And for me!”

“No, that’s not a good-” Cooper began shaking her head.

“We’ll take turns with it.” Harper emphasized this by making a circle with one hand and using the other’s index finger to act as a needle. “The three of us. We can share things, we do that already.”

“Harper.”

“So, we can find what you found.” Harper finished. “I want us all to find it just like you.”

To this day, Harper still remembered how proud her mother looked at that very moment.

“I want that very much, Sweetie.” Cooper sadly shook her head at her. “But I’ve already tried.” 

Even though the memory of that summer was three years ago, Harper still had a promise to keep.

The night before she left for Hogwarts in the morning, she snuck into her parents’ room and scoured into her mothers’ old school trunk. She knew her mother kept the compass wrapped in a skull bandana at the bottom, she saw her handle it from time to time without ever unwrapping it.

Harper switched the compass with a pocket watch she received for Christmas that year, hoping for it to feel the same so that Cooper wouldn’t be able to tell the difference by the weight and shape. And reasoned that when she got to Hogwarts that year, she would start working on it immediately.

But Hogwarts wasn’t what she expected, from the stories her sisters and mother told her. Harper found it hard to speak at times. Crowds always used to frighten her, which was why she had always been grateful to her father for carrying her on his shoulders. So that she could breathe. But the endless current of kids, always brushing past her, boxing her in, made it all seem so suffocating.

She didn’t know how to talk to others. Family was different, at home she could talk for hours and hours to her parents and siblings. But here, in this new place with its new hallways. It was so hard.

Which was why the bullying only made things worse.

Harper didn’t know what she had done to upset Echo Azgeda and Lexa Northwood and the band of Slytherin girls accompanying them whenever they hunted after her. But they were angry at her.

There were times when they cornered her in the girl’s bathroom and pinned her to the ground, conjuring up maggots from their wand tips all over her shaking body so that the slimy and smelly things wriggled underneath her clothing. Whoever had free hands covered her mouth while she screamed. It didn’t help that Clarke Griffin stood above her, admiring her followers’ handiwork.

They threw her books down onto the ground, rain or shine.

They charmed her glasses so that they fluttered away from her face.

They sealed her mouth so that she wouldn’t speak.

And they always covered their tracks. With the Slytherin girls undoing whatever spells they casted against her, righting whatever wrongs they did. Clarke was the one who disenchanted the maggots.

There was never any evidence. No proof of what happened. Sometimes Harper wondered if she imagined the awful things that were done to her. But no, she didn’t. She never would. How could she?

Which was why Harper lied in her letters. The ones she wrote to Roma and Bree and her mother. She didn’t want them to get upset, she didn’t want them to think less of her Hogwarts experiences.

After all, the other McIntyre women who attended Hogwarts had a wonderful time when they were here. They belonged, they achieved, and they shined. Harper didn’t want to break tradition.

That was how Harper forgot about the compass, wrapped up in a Gryffindor scarf at the bottom of her own trunk, and the promise she made to her mother three years ago. And how she began wondering if this was the year when she wasn’t thankful.

For anything. Because there were nights when she cried herself to sleep. When she wouldn’t talk to her fellow Gryffindor girls. Even when Fox and Monroe tried getting to know her. They tried.

They really did.

But Harper saw how the other girls treated them because of her so she didn’t try back. She saw that it bothered them. They were risking their necks. But she didn’t want them to waste their time.

There was nothing worth getting to know.

Harper remained by herself and kept to reading her books. She would not speak of what was happening to her to anyone else, not even her Professors. There were times when she wondered if others knew what was being done to her. And if they did know, why they were waiting for her to give them the go ahead to intervene. That was all Harper wished for in the end, deep down inside of herself. She just wanted someone to help her without being asked.

She found a peaceful place where she could eat her lunch. And there she remained, resigned to silence.

Until Bellamy and Roan happened to her.

And it took one stupid wrestling match, one ridiculous argument over homework, for her to laugh.

Harper hadn’t laughed in so long. She couldn’t really remember when the last time was.

It was probably the last night she spent with her family before the train to Hogwarts.

But then Harper went and screwed it up by running away. Embarrassed that she allowed such a moment of weakness to occur after being straight down the line for so long.

Then the boys found her again by the Great Lake where she ate her lunch and the rest was history.

Because the boys didn’t care. They were like Fox and Monroe, only they were hopeless at everything. At least the girls could take care of themselves. But Bellamy and Roan didn’t know left from right when it came to magic. And people were already treating them badly, even without her help. So, Harper tried back. That was how she came to life again and how they did that for her.

Before she knew it, she started catching them up with the other first-years. It was slow at first and incredibly challenging work. But Harper had more than enough time on her hands for patience.

“Wingardium Leviosa!” Bellamy voiced at one of the stones they gathered by the Great Lake, a couple feet away from their grassy knoll, all those weeks ago. They were waiting for Roan to get out of detention after mixing up his homework parchment with one he had failed to submit during the first week of school. Professor Flitwick had not been pleased with his actions. “It didn’t work.”

“You have to stress the middle sounds,” Harper replied. “It’s Win-GAR-dium Levi-O-sa. Don’t forget to focus on those parts.” She demonstrated the proper flick with her ash and acacia wand.

One of the stones popped into the air and she caught it. “Remember, that it’s all in the wrist.”

“Show-off.” Bellamy nudged her in the ribs.

"I am not!" Harper protested, while she swayed.

"Could've fooled me."

"That's how the spell is supposed to work!"

"As if my wand can tell the difference between sounds." Bellamy teased.

"It can!" Harper said hotly, her cheeks flushed and her shoulders bristled. 

"This wand is a piece of bone."

"So is your head!"

"That the best you got?" He replied flatly. 

"Why you...you little...nincompoop!" She stammered and stuttered, crimson-faced, and trembling with indignation.

"At least that we can agree on." Bellamy chuckled before he tried casting Wingardium Leviosa again. And again. And again. And again.

That’s what she learned about the boy next to her. He didn’t know when to give up. Even when he failed repeatedly. He wouldn’t stop until he saw some sort of progress. She had studied him from the corner of her eye, before she shook her head and huffed. Harper threw her stone deep across where it plopped into the murky waters of the lake.

“That was a terrible throw.” Bellamy commented. When the chestnut-haired girl went towards him, he tried moving his shins away from her incoming kicks.

“Shut. Your. Face!” Harper shot back, she bit her lower lip in concentration as she aimed at him.

Bellamy stopped moving, allowing her to kick him a few times, a weird expression on his face.

“What is it?” She replied after getting a couple more licks in before she stopped her assault.

He shrugged. “Nothing.” Then shook himself out of it. “Just looks familiar, that’s all.”

Harper started working on the compass that very night. Muttering incantations with her wand by candlelight, along the silver metal’s grooves, watching the spaces un-dent bit by bit. Fox woke up one time and shook Monroe awake, the pair of them observed. And Harper smiled back at them.

Then there was the time when she found Roan in the Gryffindor Common Room way past midnight, clutching a stack of papers and crying softly. He wasn’t doing a decent job holding back the noise, she could still hear him from the top of the stairs leading to the girl’s dormitory. Harper tip-toed down towards him in bunny slippers, a checkered shawl wrapped over her shoulders.

“Hey there.” She whispered, the fireplace only just beginning to die, as its flames sputtered and gasped amidst the glowing logs. “Are you alright?”

Roan’s distraught face shot up at her, at first shocked that he’d been discovered. But then he shook his head back and forth, his eyes squinting even more as he continued to squeeze out more tears.

He had been kneeling in front of the fireplace as if in deep in prayer over something he couldn’t ever hope to control. As Harper approached him, she realized that those papers of his were letters.

“They hate me.” Roan choked the words back to her. “Everyone in my entire family hates me.”

Harper didn’t know how to respond to that. So, she knelt next to him and took his face into her hands so that they were looking at each other. When Roan didn’t stop crying, Harper pulled him into a hug. The same hugs she got from her family back home, cradling his cheek to her shoulder.

“Even my own mother.”

She thought of her sisters and her parents and their farmhouse and realized just how lucky she was.

“I didn’t choose to be here.” He sobbed, the volume in his syllables fluctuating. “I was put here.”

Harper held him to her, elongating the hushing sounds of ‘shhh’ and ‘okay’ until he began to calm.

“I don’t know if I will have a family after this.” Roan sniffled quietly. “I won't belong anywhere.”

“You have Bellamy.” Harper insisted softly. “And you have me. You will belong to both of us.”

There was no more crying after that. Roan cleaned his cheeks, dried his eyes, and gently unwound their hug. He rubbed his nose against the collar of his pajama shirt before mumbling: “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Harper murmured.

“Don’t tell Bellamy.”

“I won’t.”

“He’ll worry about me.” Roan muttered as the fire finally went out. “And I don’t want him to.”

“Okay.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“He always worries about other people.” He gave her a sad smile. “But never about himself.”

“That sounds familiar.” Harper whispered.

“I’m trying you know. I really am.”

“Trying what?”

“To be brave.” Roan admitted. “It’s all still new to me.”

It was a while before the silence became broken by the sort of daring McIntyre’s were known for.

“Do you want to see something cool?” Harper brandished her ash and acacia bound wand.

“What do you mean?” Roan asked.

The girl grabbed a few hate letters the Azgeda clan sent to her friend, from aunts and uncles and cousins and godparents he had never met and would never meet for the duration of his life and threw them onto the glowing logs. Harper leveled her wand at the pages and firmly stated: “Incendio!” Roan opened his mouth in shock as the papers burst into flames.

And the Gryffindor Common Room fireplace rekindled once more with the burning of hate mail.

“Do you want to try?” Harper offered a few more pages from the stack. “There’s plenty more.”

Roan grinned and grabbed a bunch, eagerly awaiting her instructions on how to conjure the flames. Harper educated him on the proper way to hold his wand, the things he should be thinking about in his head, and how he should be feeling with his heart. It took many a trial and error, as always.

But the two of them managed to take turns keeping the fire alive until the morning rose onto the horizon. The words of ‘Incendio’ exchanging flames, taking turns burning all the negativity away.

Then Harper worked on her compass some more after that. She mended its surface, sewed together the cracks and fissures of its glass face. Only this time, she allowed Fox and Monroe closer to see. It didn’t take long for all three girls to begin spending more time with one another for company.

Fox and Monroe were the ones who suggested taking the compass to Raven Reyes after hearing its story. They were the ones who offered to accompany her to the Ravenclaw Tower when they saw how nervous Harper became, offering words of comfort and strategic input for any enemies.

“If anyone screws with us.” Monroe playfully whispered, as they walked together down the corridor, while Fox skipped several feet ahead of them: “We’ll leave her behind to deal with it.”

“Zoe!” Harper squealed back at her.

“What?” Monroe smirked. “Don’t you know Plan B always means sacrificing the looniest one?”

“Fox isn’t looney!”

“Have you lived in the same dormitory as me?”

“Not so loud, she’ll hear us.”

“Why are you slowpokes so slow?” Fox called out, almost two yards in front of them. “Move it!”

“Why are you so far ahead?” Monroe called back. “You don’t even know which way to go!”

Raven Reyes was the only witch in the entire castle of Hogwarts that wore goggles. The meeting occurred in an empty classroom near the portrait guarding the entrance to Ravenclaw Tower. It was dimly lit with candles sporting blue flames, courtesy of the rival to the great Clarke Griffin.

A pile of mechanical Muggle junkware and magical tools already located in the center of it all.

“Harper floating McIntyre.” The Hispanic girl draped in cobalt blue called out, “The only Gryffindor girl worth any grit.” She eyed the other Gryffindor girls who came with. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Monroe replied.

“Speak for yourself.” Fox countered. “I’ll have you know that I earned us 10 points yesterday.”

“That’s because Byrne felt sorry for you when you transformed your goblet into a gopher’s butt.”

“You said you wouldn’t tell!”

“Am I supposed to feel good about a Professor giving us consolation points cause of your blunder?”

“Harper!” Fox whined, turning to her for support.

“Zoe be nice.” Harper warned.

Monroe rolled her eyes before grumbling. “Yes, Mum.”

“See?” Fox hissed back at her with satisfaction. “That’s what you get!”

“What’s this about a puzzle?” Raven interrupted, her eyes already searching Harper’s robes for any hidden bulges, hungry for a challenge. “I hope you didn’t lie. I really do love a good puzzle.”

Harper unveiled the compass and placed it atop one of the desks. The silvery metal now smooth and sleek, the glass freshly cleaned and polished, but the obsidian needle still lifeless in the center.

“This looks promising.” Raven whispered in awe, as she circled around the target, like a vulture awaiting a chance to dig at a lifeless carcass. “I haven’t seen this before. Yes, this will do.”

“My mother tried fixing it.” Harper explained. “She repaired the glass and metal, but never the compass's function. It's why she broke it repeatedly.”

Raven mumbled a ‘mhmm’ while she continued to analyze the object in front of her.

“I don’t even know if we’ll be able to make a difference.”

“Don’t underestimate us.” Raven answered back. “We aren’t our parents. We can be better.”

“Can we?”

“Well, we can try.”

“Has anyone ever told you that you sound pretty cocky?”

“Has anyone ever told you that the youth will inherit the Earth?”

“I’ve been owling with my sisters.” Harper admitted, digging into the front of her robes. “It hasn’t been easy, one’s traveling through the States and the other is tending to dragons in China.” She fished out four letters and smoothed them out on her chest. “They think it involves Metallurgy.”

“Not just Metallurgy.” Raven pulled down her goggles, which began to glow blue in the darkness, and readjusted the lenses a couple of times. “There’s a bond here that involves a human thread.”

“Human thread?” Harper asked, adjusting her own glasses.

“Blood.” Raven concluded, rolling up the sleeves of her robes. “And a whole lot of it.”

“That sounds…complicated.”

“That’s because it is.”

“Whose blood will we need to make it work?”

“Well, I assume you and your sisters share the same blood as your mother.” Raven ventured, jabbing an index finger in her direction. “You sure there aren’t any others I should know about?”

“Just us McIntyre girls.” Harper answered.

“Good.” Raven settled. “Then we’ll only need yours.”

“So, it can be fixed”

“That depends.”

“Depends on what?”

Raven pulled her goggles up on her face, the lenses still glowing blue, and turned to face her.

"What do you need it for?”

“Excuse me?”

“If I’m offering my services, I need to know the agenda of my client. No matter how crazy it is.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Afraid not.”

“How are you guys doing this?” Fox whispered from the side. “We’re still in first year…”

“Forget it.” Monroe muttered. “These girls are in a league of their own. Just like Griffin.”

That’s what all the other Professors said about them, this trio of first year girls. The red, the blue, and the green. Unprecedented, the greatest minds they’ve seen from children their age. It got old.

Harper stared down Raven, her hands tightened into fists…before unclenching. She sighed: “It belongs to my mother. And we sort of owe our family to its magic.” She brushed the front of her robes, trying to dry her clammy hands. “Since it brought us together. I figured I return the favor.”

“Return the favor?” Raven questioned, a skeptical eyebrow raised.

“Bringing it together.” Harper finished. “So, it’s fixed and working again in time for Christmas.”

Raven’s eyes attempted a final once over, as if trying to access the worth of Harper’s resolve.

“Good answer.” The Hispanic girl determined, looking impressed. “Let’s get started then.”

The process devoured an entire week of their time, which consisted of meeting in secret, shuffling materials and supplies to the empty classroom next to Ravenclaw Tower, and engraving runes along the edges of the compass with a chiseled scalpel. The entire process proved time-consuming.

Harper sliced open her hand repeatedly to donate the necessary amounts of blood, while Raven helped by hooking up Muggle tools like nodes and wire from Harper’s temples to the compass. Harper managed to mend her own bloodily bandaged hand several times, the alchemy that used it could be found in all the boiling and bubbling cauldrons and flasks of multi-colored and thick-misted potions. All of it went to the glass, the metal, to the inner essence of the compass.

Monroe and Fox were there, mainly for support, because the last time they were given access to tools, the two of them pretended to be martial arts masters with monkey wrenches and lead pipes for swords. After that, they were ordered to stand down and let Raven and Harper do everything.

All the time always.

Although that didn’t stop Harper from excitedly filling in Fox and Monroe on their progress whenever they navigated the Gryffindor first year girl’s dorm. It’s the most animated they’ve seen of her since, well, forever. Harper forced the two girls to promise not to tell Bellamy and Roan. She wanted the compass to be completely fixed by the time she told them the story behind it.

When the boys asked Harper where she, Fox, and Monroe spent their time during the week, because the only time they saw each other had been during lunch hours, the three made excuses.

Fox needed help with Transfiguration and Monroe needed help with Charms. Harper tutored them.

The boys believed them of course, after all Harper was the one who got them back on track. They had been steadily improving in all their core subjects thanks to her. And Harper had been the one to bring two new members, Fox and Monroe, to their spot. They nodded and ate their sandwiches.

Besides, Bellamy and Roan were spending every chance they got at the Quidditch pitch. They watched the House teams practicing and whispered to themselves about all the ways that made the sport an absolute universal treasure. Bellamy and Roan began practicing more and more on their Flying skills, more than any of their classmates. Thanks to Madame Hooch’s remedial classes.

Which they volunteered for of course.

Harper had a feeling the boys enjoyed whizzing on their broomsticks outside, wind in their hair while they hooted after each other more than anything else on this planet, and that anything Quidditch related piqued their interests. She made a point to remember that fact when she planned for future lessons with Bellamy and Roan.

The final day Raven, Harper, Fox, and Monroe worked together consisted of a massive glyph of a rune drawn in the center of the classroom, made from chalk. Fox and Monroe covered their ears, while the greatest first year witches from Gryffindor and Ravenclaw bonded a jagged stream of lightning together above the chalk. Harper’s ash and acacia against Raven’s metallic meteorite.

It was a deafening sound they were emitting, the brightness overwhelming their eyes, but the light between their wands broke off into branches and struck the compass. Again, and again and again.

When the lightning stopped, and the smoke disappeared, the obsidian needle of the compass began to spin. Harper and Raven rushed to the center of the chalk, a map of Hogwarts and a map of England in their hands, before smoothing out the papers and calling for light from Fox and Monroe. The two other girls rushed to their side and whispered “Lumos” so that all four of them could see the maps together. After they organized what was where, Raven nodded at Harper. Who reached out her hand and touched the compass so that the reed of black glass shot in a single direction.

The four girls traced their fingers from one point on the map to the other side of another.

“That’s home.” Harper whispered, her breath shaking and eyes glowing. “That’s my house and my farm and my village. That’s my home!” She grabbed Raven and kissed her forehead. “You did it!”

“We did it.” Raven whispered back with that signature smirk of hers.

Fox and Monroe wrapped Harper and Raven into a messy hug and pulled them down with them to the floor, laughing hysterically and planting noisy kisses on both their faces. Raven struggled to escape them, visibly disgusted by what they were doing, but Harper could see beginnings of a soft smile deep in her features. Especially when Monroe blew out raspberries until she choked on her own saliva and Fox showed off her looney side when she began sniffing at the Ravenclaw girl’s hair. As if she was a golden retriever and Raven’s hair was a new stranger she just had to greet at the park.

“Thank you.” Harper told Raven, breathless from all the laughter. “Thank you for helping me.”

“It was quite the puzzle.” Raven returned with equal respect. “Be sure to bring me another.”

Afterwards, when the four of them recovered, Raven returned to the Ravenclaw Tower eager to work on other projects, somehow inspired by their experiences. They made her promise to keep them informed of any breakthroughs. Then Harper, Fox, and Monroe ran out past the courtyard and castle walls, into the Hogwarts grounds outside. Laughing madly as they twirled around and around over the grass. Bellamy and Roan still had afternoon Flying lessons with Madame Hooch.

The silver-haired instructor seemed quite fond of the boys who always pestered her with questions about proper forms and grips and stances and disciplines when it came to Flying and she always indulged them. Harper remembered one time when she saw Bellamy and Roan rush up to Madame Hooch, showing her a Quidditch magazine about the latest brooms and team standings.

It was the same one they had shown Harper, Fox, and Monroe earlier that same day during lunch.

But the boys would return from their Flying lessons and they would know of the compass because Harper would tell them. About the story behind it, about her family and her farm. About how Raven, Fox, and Monroe helped her fix it even though it wouldn’t serve them. About how she had changed.

Because for the first time since Harper arrived here at Hogwarts from the Express, she felt like there were things to be thankful for again. And she was thankful, Merlin’s beard, she was thankful.

For friends she was finally able to make for herself and call her own. For Bellamy, Roan, Fox, Monroe, and Raven.

Harper would tell them all this tonight during the feast. It was Thanksgiving after all.

The three girls were running for so long, without looking where they were going or what was around, that they ended up in front of the Whomping Willow. Hogwarts’ most violent vegetation.

An enormous tree that could hit you back. Its massive branches dangled dangerously overhead.

“Blimey.” Fox whispered in awe, inching closer towards it. “Would you look at the size of that.”

“Be careful.” Monroe warned, pulling back the girl when she got too close. “It’s dangerous.”

“How did it get that way, you reckon?” Fox asked. “Merlin’s beard, trees don’t just hurt people.”

“This one does.”

“Trees are supposed to help people. They’re supposed to grow things.”

“I’m not sure if this one grows anything anymore.”

“Not even apples?”

“Especially not apples.”

“Roma and Bree used to tell me.” Harper began, clutching the compass tightly in the inner pocket of her robes. “That the Whomping Willow was grown at Hogwarts to keep people safe.”

“Safe from what?” Monroe asked.

“A werewolf.”

“Galloping gargoyles!” Fox exclaimed, her eyes widening with excitement. “A werewolf?!”

“The tree kept people away from it during full moons.” Harper explained.

“You’re not serious.” Monroe looked back at her with utter disbelief.

“That’s what my sisters said.” Harper stated. “Apparently it was a student-”

That was when the ground pulled out from under her feet. Her face fell flat against it. Harper felt her glasses break when the smell of dirt and grass entered her mouth and nose. When she raised her head, to spit out all the muck, she found she was right about her glasses. The left frame barely held itself together, both lenses were cracked, and the bridge between them looked crooked.

“Harper!” Fox cried, rushing towards her, only for the ground to pull out from underneath. The girl tumbled onto the dirt as well, equally as hard. She rolled around in pain, clutching her ribs.

When she tried getting up, something pulled her across the ground, dragged her until she stopped.

“What the-” Monroe couldn’t pull out her wand fast enough, before an unknown force lashed across her chest, sending her backwards onto the dirt. The crack of the whip sounded like the wind.

Harper struggled to stand up, reaching around for her own wand, fumbling around the compass in her pocket while doing so, before the same cracking wind sent her flat on her back. Facing the sky.

Her compass and wand laid out in the open grass, far from her reach.

“Wingardium Leviosa.” A voice drawled. Harper saw the family heirloom jump into the air before being caught by Clarke Griffin.

Of course, it was her, Harper thought bitterly. The middle sounds of the spell had been correctly stressed, just like she learned. Even the wand flicked just right with the proper motion of the wrist.

Harper reached for her own wand only to see it skip farther and farther away from her fingers.

“You’d be surprised with the kinds of things girls trade for these days.” Clarke began. The sound of Fox still being dragged across the dirt, could be heard. The blonde-haired girl rolled her eyes and turned to the tallest of her companions. “That’s enough. You can stop now.”

Echo Azgeda smiled, it was the kind of smile that sent shivers down a spine. She finished looping Fox around in circles on the grass with her angel oak before stopping. “I’m done anyways.”

Monroe started crawling to them, wand in hand, a pained expression on her face. She raised it.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Lexa Northwood sang. She sank a knee onto Monroe’s shoulders and held her own wand, a sharpened bamboo reed, against the back of her neck. “Drop it. Now.”

“Float you!” Monroe struggled to shake her off before groaning in pain when Lexa sank lower.

“I told you to drop it.” Lexa repeated, her voice rising in volume. She grabbed a handful of Monroe’s hair, and shook it violently. “DROP IT RIGHT NOW!” Monroe let go of her wand.

Echo chuckled, moving towards the two of them, and bent over to collect Monroe’s piece of rosewood before tossing it next to Fox’s oak elm off to the side. “And you call me the crazy one.”

“Go to hell, Azgeda.”

“Love you too, Northwood.”

“As I was SAYING.” Clarke continued, as if they never left off. “You’d be surprised with the things girls trade for these days.” She moved to join Harper, so she could watch her from below.

“Please…” Harper begged. She had been having such a wonderful day, everything had been so good.

“The other first-year girls in your dorm.” Clarke sneered. “Don’t like you very much, do they?”

Harper felt her stomach drop, her eyes widened at the realization. That there were Gryffindor girls who were in league with her. Just like the Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs she heard tales of. Slytherin had eyes and ears everywhere, there wasn’t a secret or crush that Clarke Griffin didn’t know about.

Clarke tossed the compass in the air before catching it again.

“Give that back.” Harper struggled to her elbows. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

“Nothing belongs to anyone, McIntyre.” Clarke sighed, tossing it and catching it again. “Things always change owners, things will always come and go.” She smirked. “Life’s fickle, isn’t it?”

“Please give it back.” Harper pleaded, desperation behind each of her words. “Please.”

“Come now, McIntyre.” Lexa called from nearby.

“You can beg better than that!” Echo cackled.

“Why are you doing this?” Harper demanded, ignoring the other two and focusing on Clarke.

“Because I want to.” The Slytherin girl answered. Like it was all so simple to see. “Because I can.” She turned to look at the compass in her hand as if she were appraising its value. "So, this is the compass I’ve heard so much about.” Clarke grinned at the words in cursive. “What a pretty thing.”

“What did they say?” She asked quietly.

“The traitors?”

Harper nodded.

“Well when these fools weren't around.” Clarke gestured to Fox and Monroe on the side. “They talked quite a lot into my two-way mirror.”

“About what?”

“About how you were working with Reyes on it.” Clarke responded. She glared at her savagely. “What’s the matter, McIntyre? Can’t beat me on your own, so you join forces to bring me down?

“It wasn’t about House points!”

“Your dear Gryffindors also told me it belongs to your precious little mother.” Clarke continued with delight. “You know, the witch who betrayed our people and married your Mudblood of a father.”

“Don’t you dare!” Harper warned Clarke, her voice rising with every word. “Don’t you call him that!”

“Just like those new friends of yours. The disgrace and the Mudblood-”

“DON’T YOU CALL THEM THAT!” Harper screamed.

“I'LL CALL THEM WHATEVER I LIKE!” Clarke shrieked back at her. And when Harper tried to rise, the Slytherin girl planted her boot into her chest and pressed down hard so that she returned to the dirt.

Harper looked up at Clarke with as much hate as she could muster. She never knew she had that much.

“I’m going to bury you, McIntyre.” Clarke cooed.

She felt the left hinge of her glasses correct. Saw the lenses clear and uncrack. The bridge and the thick frame around it reharden, re-shape in perfect balance. Echo and Lexa raised their wands.

“I’m going to bury you and your blood traitor ways.”

She saw the grass and dirt leave her robes and skin, saw the same thing happen to Fox and Monroe.

“So, that your name never dishonors our kind again.”

Harper watched in horror when she realized what was happening. The wrongs were righted. The proof of any misdeeds no longer there. Things were back to normal again. Like it was all just a dream.

“But, first-”

“No!” Harper screamed, when Clarke’s boot left her chest, lunging after her. “Please don’t! NO!”

“-here’s a little something to remember me by.”

The Slytherin girl turned and threw the family heirloom, Cooper McIntyre’s compass, at the Whomping Willow. Harper cried out, tears in her eyes and terror in her voice. And long after Clarke and her gang of Slytherin girls returned to the castle, long after the threat had come and gone. Harper continued crying. Cradled by Fox and Monroe as she begged for it to come back. For the compass to point her in the direction of her sisters and father and mother. A gift forever lost.

The sky began to darken, signaling the beginning of the Thanksgiving feast, but it didn’t matter.

Harper didn’t have anything left to be thankful for.


	8. The Broken Lion Boys

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys go to war.
> 
> "I See Fire" by Ed Sheeran

Of all the Greek myths Kane reenacted for him when they were at the hospital, using the paper-paged figurines made from all the books he used to bring, Bellamy Blake only ever loved one the most.

Prometheus, the thief of fire.

The one Titan who dared to defy the very gods of Mount Olympus. The king of them all, Zeus.

Bellamy remembered the tower of pages that served as the mountain during the pantomime. Its edges jagged and ringed with the lines of would-be rocks. The pillar of paper reached to the ceiling.

“Prometheus scaled the mountain.” Kane said softly, waving his own bone wand made from a timber wolf’s spine. “When all the gods were asleep. He climbed, and he climbed, and he climbed.”

A papyrus giant, with knots of chapters for its joints, began clawing its way up to the movements of the Auror’s wand. Marcus Kane weaved and bobbed with the motions, as if he were a conductor.

And the literature his orchestra.

“Prometheus sculpted man from clay.” Kane said. “Which gave him the title of creator and father.”

The golem lost its grip on a ledge, dangling dangerously to its death, before pulling itself back up.

“But the Titan never viewed his children as any lesser than himself.”

Bellamy breathed a quiet “wow” when the figurine jumped from one part of the tower to another.

“He didn’t believe in hoarding knowledge.” The Auror smiled. “He didn’t want them in the dark.”

When the paper giant reached its destination, it pulled a levitating wad of paper resembling a spitball from the top of the mountain and started to climb back down. Holding the ball in triumph.

“Prometheus believed humanity deserved the gift of fire.” Kane finished. “Mankind’s birthright.”

The Auror used to tell him, before the discovery of fire, humans had no way to warm themselves in the night and no way to cook their food. Bellamy shivered at the thought of eating raw meat. Helpless and naked to the winds of wintery snow. It must have been a very hard life for everyone back then.

“The Titan stole fire from the gods and gave it to his children.”

The paper giant dropped the spitball to the paper people that gathered below.

Everyone threw their hands up and celebrated, jumping up and down in joy, before rushing off.

Prometheus did the right thing, Bellamy thought. No one should have to grow up hungry and cold.

“Men, women, and children rejoiced. They used fire to make tools and build cities and fight wars”

He pumped a fist in the air and let out a quiet “yeah” because he was the audience and he knew the audience had to be quiet, especially during theatre, but also appreciative. He liked the latter.

“But the fire hadn’t been Prometheus’s to give.” Kane told him ominously. “It had been the gods’.”

Several needles of paper pierced into the figurine, pinning it to the side of the paper mountain.

Bellamy whispered a “no” when he saw that all those needles looked zig-zag crooked. They were lightning bolts. He looked for where they came from and felt his stomach drop at the cloud of crumpled up paper balls he saw. It appeared, carrying a massive block upon several muscled pages.

Zeus, the god of thunder, had finally come to collect compensation.

“Out of all the gods, Zeus was the most furious.” Kane stated. “He saw this as an act of rebellion.”

“Why?” Bellamy asked. He didn’t usually talk during Kane’s performances. But he did then.

“Because he had no right.” The Auror answered. “To him, the Titan hadn’t just stolen the fire.”

The paper Zeus loomed over the trapped body of paper Prometheus, holding the paper lightnings.

“Prometheus had stolen the authority. He had taken away Zeus’s decision to govern his kingdom.”

Then everything about the god of thunder changed, transformed into an eagle made from paper pages. It flapped its wings closer towards the vulnerable Prometheus and started clawing, pecking, ravaging the paper Titan’s stomach open. Scraps and shreds of paper fluttered towards the ground.

“So, Zeus condemned Prometheus to a life sentence.” Kane said. “An endless cycle of torture.”

Zeus, the paper eagle, retreated. The stomach of paper Prometheus corrected itself, reforming the pages to replace what had been torn apart. And then it happened all over again. The mauling and the healing, the eagle god and the rebel Titan, forever bonded in never-ending vengeance and pain.

Afterwards, when Kane reverted all the pages back to normal and returned them to their respective homes in the books, Bellamy asked him again about why Prometheus had done what he did.

“He had to have known.” He said, after Kane tucked him into bed.

“Who?” The Auror finished smoothing out the front covers of his blanket.

“Prometheus.” Bellamy responded. “He had to have known what they would do to him in the end.”

“You’re right.” Kane smiled at the boy’s words. “You would think he’d have a better escape plan.”

“Then why risk it?” The boy asked. “If he knew how bad it would be once everyone found out?”

“I think, to him, the deed was worth the risk.”

“How can getting your liver eaten over and over again be worth anything?”

“Prometheus was thinking of family.” Kane said. “Their safety and happiness meant everything.”

And that made sense to Bellamy, all those months ago. The Titan made man from clay and then man suffered, so he went to go fix it. Even if it meant doing a very dangerous thing. Prometheus did it.

Maybe he figured he would get away with it. Maybe he thought Zeus and the gods wouldn’t notice. Maybe he never expected his liver to be allowed to regrow time and time again only to be shredded.

But Prometheus made the choice for the children he made from clay. He made sure they had somewhere safe to sleep, something warm to eat, and something to look forward to the next day.

And even though they caught him and punished him for the crime of looking out for his own, the fire he stole from the gods of Olympus never vanished. There was still fire out there in the world.

There was still warmth and light that people could manufacture for themselves. With their hands.

For some reason, the notion that fire could be tamed amused him. Because it reminded him of Octavia. The girl had been a few years younger than him, but she had such a fiery temper. And even though he and his mother took care of her, they always found it very hard to control her rage.

Bellamy thought of his little sister, wondered if what he told Kane and Jaha that night in the bunker headquarters of the Order of Phoenix had been true. Kane told him that he and the others had tried to pull the memory of what happened out of his head but admitted that it was too fractured to see.

His mind had been broken that night in more ways than one, the night he lost his real family.

Which was why they admitted him, a Muggle, to St. Mungo’s at such a young age. So that he recovered, and they could see if the memory would rebuild itself and remain whole eventually.

But deep down, Bellamy had doubts about what he said. Maybe the people who came to his flat that night really did kill his little sister and he just couldn’t remember it. Maybe Kane and Jaha didn’t really believe Octavia was out there, still alive, waiting to be rescued after all these years.

Kane had promised Bellamy once, during his first week in St. Mungo’s, that he would help him find his sister. But he needed to get better, needed to remember. And when he discovered he could do magic and needed help developing it, directing it, he told him to live his life through Hogwarts.

And when he was ready. When he learned all the proper skills and spells needed to fight. Then Kane would take Bellamy with him to find his sister. Alive or dead. That was what he promised.

Which was why Bellamy had written the letter to Kane. It expressed all his thanks. All his love for the man who promised him the eventual reunion with his beloved, lost sister.

Bellamy still remembered the final exchange the two of them had that night after Prometheus’s tragic end. It was something that he carried with him whenever he walked the halls of Hogwarts.

“What do you think was going on in his head?” Bellamy had asked Kane. “When he held the fire?”

“I like to think that Prometheus believed...” The Auror had answered: “Fortune favors the bold.”

Bellamy had been playing catch with Roan and Miller over the pitch when it happened. Before the news reached them. Madame Hooch’s whistle blew, signaling the ten-minute mark before clean-up. The three of them, along with a few other first-years, volunteered for these remedial classes.

It never seemed like extra work for them. If anything, they looked forward to the opportunity. Bellamy and Roan always asked Madame Hooch when the next one would be, and she always sighed and shrugged, but they could tell she was itching to reserve the pitch for another session. It always meant extra practice. Extra time for the boys to get air time and feel the wind around them.

Bellamy never expected to fall in love with Flying. When he first saw what magical people were capable of on broomsticks, when he saw how witches and wizards did acrobatics and insane feats so high above the ground, he thought they were mental. It looked so dangerous, the art of Flying.

But then he felt it, felt the adrenaline surge through his veins and the excitement that flowed through him whenever he zoomed through the air, the wind billowing through his hair and robes.

And when he looked below him, at how high up he was, he felt like Helios riding his sun chariot.

Roan shared his enthusiasm of course, but the biggest surprise had been Miller, who began to hang out with them because he too volunteered for the classes. Bellamy and Roan enjoyed having him.

The three of them shared the same love of Quidditch as well, always talking about up and coming players and the next superstar stacked team to take over the skies. Miller had been the one who told him about the World Cup, which seemed so fantastic, so out of this world, he turned to Roan for confirmation. The long-haired boy nodded and talked about how it happened every four years.

“What position would you play?” Bellamy heaved the quilted Quaffle towards Miller. They floated in the sky, watching the sun dip into the clouds, casting a reddish orangey hue. “In Quidditch?”

“Beater.” Miller caught it with considerable ease. “My Dad used to play that when he went here.”

“You’d rather hurt people?” Roan called incredulously. He gestured to his chest with his free hand, asking for the quilted Quaffle next. “Wouldn’t you rather fly around trying to score the points?”

“It’s not about hurting.” Miller sounded back. He raised his arm back and tossed it forward. The boy’s weight shifted, causing his broom to sway, but he remained on top. “It’s about protecting.”

“Protecting?” Roan echoed. “You’re hitting Bludgers at people with a bat. That’s more like hitting them from a distance.” He zoomed towards the moving target and raised both hands, scooping it.

“Aye, we’re dangerous.” Miller nodded back. “But in Quidditch, everyone is a target.” He did a turn around with his broom. “Everyone is aiming at the Keeper and Seeker and all the Chasers.”

“On purpose?” Bellamy flew above and ahead of Roan, waving his right hand. He wanted to try out a new move. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?” He saw Roan chuck the sphere at him.

“The referees don’t always see.” Miller answered. “They can’t usually tell the difference between a collision and a penalty. Which is why Beaters usually tend to take matters into their own hands.”

“Old school justice!” Roan hooted, whizzing towards Bellamy, trying to muck up his catch.

“Ain’t that the truth!” Miller mimicked what the long-haired boy was doing towards Bellamy.

Bellamy lifted off the broom and reached out, stretching his right hand backwards. He managed to palm the quilted Quaffle before flipping his entire body over, gripping the broom hard with his left so that he rebalanced himself in time. It felt so fluid and so natural and Bellamy loved doing it.

He knew he wasn’t as talented as his fellow first-years in all their core subjects. Knew he could never measure up with the likes of Harper McIntyre and Raven Reyes. Knew that he was still very behind on a lot of spells and potions and general knowledge about the magical world. But this….

…Bellamy knew he was good at this. He knew that when he was on a broom, the sky was all his.

“That was a good one.” Miller clapped his hands appreciatively, leaning forward on his broom.

“Not too shabby.” Roan snorted. But it wasn’t a mean laugh. Bellamy practiced whenever he could.

Madame Hooch’s whistle blew for the final time, signaling the end of extra class time, and she shot a green flare from her wand for good measure, the smoke emphasizing that it was time to go.

“What do you reckon will be at the Thanksgiving feast?” Roan asked as their brooms descended.

“There better be meat pies.” Miller placed a hand on his growling stomach. “I’m starving.”

“I’d settle for some boiled potatoes.”

“And a brace of conies.”

“Beef Wellington.”

“Roasted lamb.”

“Do you think there will be timballo?” Bellamy asked. “My Mom used to make that for me.”

Roan and Miller stared at him, unsure of how to reply even after their feet touched the ground and their brooms leveled out to be grabbed. Bellamy never talked about his mother, not even to Roan. Whenever the subject came up during their conversations, he would say that she died when he was very young and it was just him and his father now. Miller figured the subject was touchy. Given how awkward and quiet it just became. So, as the three of them walked towards Madame Hooch, brooms in their hands, he tried to make light of the situation. Because humor had a way of healing.

“What the float is a timballo?” Miller questioned.

Roan burst out laughing. Bellamy chuckled at both his friends before saying: “It’s a pasta cake.”

“You say that like it’s supposed to mean something.” Roan teased. “We don’t know what that is.”

“I hope Madame Pomfrey doesn’t mind missing the feast.” Bellamy grabbed him in a headlock, roughly jostling him so that his hair swayed. “Because I’m sending you to her on a silver platter.”

That had been another recurring joke between the three of them. Ever since they started attending Madame Hooch’s additional Flying lessons, they had suffered many an injury. Bellamy dislocated his shoulder when he landed wrong, tumbling off his broom. Roan and Miller suffered joint concussions when they collided with one another headfirst, neither paying attention to their brooms’ paths. The list of cuts and sores the three brought to the nurse’s attention was always long.

Whenever one or more of them made their way into her office, Madame Pomfrey sighed and shook her head, like how Madame Hooch would whenever they pestered her about Quidditch and Flying.

It got to the point that Madame Pomfrey started calling them her “Broken Lion Boys.” To be honest, the nickname sounded more like a teen boy band than a group of boys wanting to just fly.

But whenever they brought themselves to her, bleeding or bruised, she fussed and tutted the name.

After Madame Hooch locked up all the broomsticks, the three boys changed out of their gear padding, taking notice of the glowering Murphy down the row of lockers next to them, and dressed into their school robes. Murphy had been struggling to improve on his Flying, but to no positive results. Miller, Bellamy, and Roan surmised that the boy wanted desperately to rival them.

He struggled and if he wasn’t such a twat half the time, the boys would feel sorry for him. Almost.

Roan and Miller had already begun walking towards the Great Hall when Bellamy remembered and called out to Roan: “Oi, we promised to meet up with Harper after, so we could walk together!”

“He’s right, mate.” Roan nodded back in agreement and slapped Miller’s shoulder with the back of his hand. “Come on, we’ll introduce you to everyone. Like Fox and Monroe, they’re a package.”

“Which one is the looney one again?” Miller asked. “You two are always complaining about that.”

“Neither of them is.” Roan explained. “But Monroe likes to think she’s the normal one of the two.”

“Which is stupid.” Bellamy said. “Because Roan and I deserve the title more than Fox.”

“We’re the looniest ones of them all.”

“And we’ll be damned if the girls take yet another thing away from us boys.”

“Looney means crazy right?”

“And crazy is basically another word for badass.”

“So, it shouldn’t belong to a bunch of girls.”

“Girls are smarter, we all know that.”

“Look at Harper.” Roan supported.

“But boys are crazier. Which means we’re more badass.” Bellamy declared.

“Take us for example.”

“We Fly.”

“And if anyone’s going to be called looney in Hogwarts…”

“…It’s us Flyers!”

“I’m not looney.” Miller pretended he didn’t know the two boys next to him as if others could hear their loud voices. He inched away, whispering to himself. “I’m a Flyer too, but I’m not looney.”

Bellamy and Roan saw Miller’s embarrassment and grappled him, jokingly trying to throw him.

And that was how they found Fox, sobbing in a far-off corner of the hall. Her hair disheveled and tears had streaked down her face. She had been rocking herself, hitting and tearing at her scalp, calling herself “stupid” and “idiot” repeatedly. When Fox saw them, she ran into their arms crying.

That was how they found out about Harper. About how she locked herself in the Gryffindor first year girls’ bathroom and refused to come out, refused to speak to anyone. Even her and Monroe. And that Monroe insisted that Fox find Raven for help while she stayed there, trying desperately to coax Harper into coming out so she could comfort her. Only Monroe was crying too and so was Harper through the door and it was hard to tell who was crying the loudest. But she was sure that Harper won because the compass belonged to her and all she wanted was to fix it for her family. And Fox couldn’t remember the way to Ravenclaw Tower, so she called herself those mean things.

Bellamy and Roan pulled Fox into a tight hug between the two of them, trying desperately to calm her down. When Fox finished telling the story of how Raven helped Harper fix it and how happy she was that she and Monroe got to tag along and how Clarke Griffin and her gang of Slytherin girls ruined everything, Bellamy and Roan lightly exchanged a kiss a piece on the top of her head.

“Do you know what happened to the compass?” Bellamy leveled her face with his. “Did it break?”

“I don’t know!” Fox cried. “Griffin threw it so high that it went over the branches!”

“But you didn’t see it break!” Roan steadied her back, so she could breathe. “It could still be there!”

“Maybe?” She sniffled. “But the Whomping Willow MOVES. A lot. It might already be gone.”

“We don’t know that.” Bellamy urged. “It could have missed the branches.”

“It could have gotten through.” Roan encouraged. “I see birds fly near that thing all the time!”

Miller never said a word, he stood back watching the three of them in their embrace.

“There’s no proof!” Fox wailed, her head hung in despair. “No one will believe Griffin did this!”

“Did you try telling anyone?” Roan asked quietly, but Bellamy knew from the look on his face, his shoulders. He was enraged that a member of his old family, Echo, had attacked his new one.

“None of the other girls in the dorm believed us!” She insisted. “They just said too bad!”

“What about the Professors?” Bellamy ventured. “Did you talk to any of them?”

“What do you think?” Fox shook her head fearfully. “They’ll hurt us even more if we do that.”

“Fox listen to me.” Bellamy pointed to the opposite end of the hall. “Go straight and take a left. Go all the way down until you see a fork. Ravenclaw Tower is to the left path. Find Raven, okay?”

Then the boys ran faster than they had ever run. The air whistled through their hair, billowed through their robes, and the sound of their steps echoed with every footfall. Bellamy and Roan sprinted around corners, dodged knots of dawdling boys and groups of incoming girls. At first Bellamy thought it had been only the two of them who were moving, but soon discovered Miller trailing close behind, huffing and puffing like a miniature Hogwarts Express. Only in human form.

When the three of them started crossing the Quidditch pitch, the evening had already begun turning into darkish, dullish blue. Its splotches approaching near the horizon. It looked nothing like before.

Roan reached the storage closet first, the palms of his hands banging into the wood from the impact. By the time Bellamy reached him, the long-haired boy had already begun panickily fiddling the ivory tiles that emblazoned the door with colored symbols and weird shapes. And by the time Miller reached them, Roan had already released a frustrated shout of anguish: “FLOAT!”

“Roan.” Bellamy panted for air. “Not helping.”

“It’s all our fault, Bellamy.” Roan gasped. “They got attacked because we weren’t there.”

“I know.”

“Tell me we’re going to make this right for Harper.”

“We will.”

“How?” Roan looked to him. “How are we going to do this?”

“Well you know.” Bellamy nodded back. “We are the loons.”

Madame Hooch already tucked away all the brooms and sealed the closet shut with her own personal combination of tiles and symbols that neither Bellamy nor Roan knew anything about.

But Nathan Miller did. The boy had peeked at the way that Madame Hooch arranged them.

Nathan was the only first-year boy she trusted, from any of the Houses, to help her clean up and lock up after remedial sessions. Bellamy knew, he and Roan tried to get her to allow them to help.

But she never agreed to it because she feared what they would do with access to the broomsticks.

She felt that way because she once caught them attempting an “Alohomora” spell, but to no avail.

They were not responsible enough, that had been what Madame Hooch told them, not yet at least.

Not like Miller. The boy who had confided in Bellamy and Roan that he figured out how to do it.

“Nate!” Bellamy gestured at the door. “The combination!”

Miller didn’t seem to be struggling for air like his friends. He remained silent.

“Oi!” Roan snapped his fingers. “Speak up! You’ve barely caught any air.”

“I can’t let you do this.” Miller kept his head down.

“What?” Bellamy felt a cold chill sink into his chest and clench. “What are you talking about?”

“No Flying without Madame Hooch.” Miller shook his head. “We’re first-years. That’s the rule.”

“Normally I’d laugh at you.” Roan pointed at him. “But now’s not the time. We’re losing light.”

“There is no light.” Miller raised his head. “And I’m not joking.”

“I don’t need a crystal ball to see that, Professor Trelawney!” Roan yelled. “Open the damn door!”

“No.” Miller straightened himself.

“Typical Nathan!” Roan shouted. “Something tests your loyalty, you pack all your bags, and run!”

“I’m trying to help you!” Miller bellowed angrily.

“Well you never cared for us before!” Roan roared. “Why would you care about us now?!”

“You’re wrong.” Miller stood tall, holding his ground. “They’ll expel you.”

“Only if they catch us.” Bellamy responded. “Everyone is at the feast. No one knows we’re here.”

“You heard Fox.” Miller reasoned. “That compass is probably shattered by now. It isn’t worth it.”

“If there’s a chance we can get it back.” Bellamy said. “If it can be fixed. Then it’s worth the risk.”

“I can’t lose Hogwarts.” Miller backed away. “I love it here. This is where I learn.”

“We’re not asking you to come with us.” Bellamy raised his hand. “We’re asking you for brooms.”

Miller stopped moving and stared at him.

“Open that door for us.” Bellamy gently commanded. “And you walk away. That’s the end of it.”

The Quidditch pitch thickened with silence.

“We never cared you know.” Roan breathed. “What Murphy said about you that night.”

Miller looked to him next.

“It never bothered us.” Roan told the boy. “And it never will.”

The mid-autumn air wrapped all three boys with a beckoning, frigid breeze.

“What if the Willow kills the two of you?” Miller asked quietly.

Roan had an answer for that: “Then it kills two instead of three.”

“You’re mad.” Miller chuckled sadly. “Both you blokes are bloody mad.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Bellamy smiled. “Fortune favors the bold.”

The three boys parted there, with two rising towards the sky while the last remained on the earth.

In the dark, the Whomping Willow looked like a dragon out of a fairy tale cave. It loomed and lumbered, its branches overarched like wings unfolding themselves, preparing for flight. It sounded frightening. All its divisions and leaves and limbs stretched and whooshed through the air with quiet, malevolent intent. As if it were waiting for something to try its nerve. To meddle.

Bellamy and Roan casted “Lumos” with their wands, one of the few spells Harper managed to inscribe and instill into their brains. They held the lights in front of them as they circled the outer perimeter of the Whomping Willow, far from its base. But even with their newfound wand light, the dark surrounding them proved to be too much. They couldn’t see any signs of the compass.

So, the boys tried the trick that Harper taught them. They flicked their wands so that the orbs of light at the tip of their wands soared through the air and landed on the grassy dirt beneath them. Bellamy and Roan summoned another “Lumos” charm and repeated the process, priming the charms and throwing them at the areas below and around the Whomping Willow. Again, and again.

They continued to do this until the bioluminescent balls of light covered the tree and ground so that the view brightened around them. In cover of night, they resembled teardrops of silvery syrup.

“Do you see anything?” Roan called to him, soaring in from the left.

“Not yet.” Bellamy returned, flying in from the right. “We need to get closer!”

“Are you sure that’s our only option?”

“What other choice do we have?”

“The one that doesn’t involve us dying!”

“Tonight’s a good a night as any for that!”

“Well I’m ready when you are!” Roan whooped.

Bellamy howled: “Let’s do it!”

The two boys crossed and swooped back and forth from one end of the Whomping Willow to the other. At first the tree didn’t swing at them, it acted as if they both were gnats buzzing around, insignificant insects not worth caring about, so they ducked and weaved and zoomed. Then it became clear to the Willow that these weren’t insects, they were people. Things worth smashing.

That’s when the branches and limbs began accelerating, their velocity increasing with every swipe. Bellamy and Roan changed their flight patterns, shifted the weight of their waists to turn. It was just another Flying lesson to them, the threat of injury and the thrill of escaping danger all too familiar. Madame Hooch wasn’t there to watch them, to worry and yell when they did too much.

It was what separated Bellamy and Roan from the rest of the first-years in Hogwarts. The refusal to care about what happened to them, their dedication to things that made them happy and smile.

The people they wanted to do right by.

“I SEE IT!” Roan shouted as they passed a seventh time. Or had it been an eighth? Bellamy couldn’t keep track; his cheeks were numb from the cold wind around them. “I see the compass!”

“WHERE?” Bellamy roared back. He zoomed towards his friend hovering from across the way.

“Over there!” Roan pointed at a bushel of branches. “Tucked between two twigs. Just hanging there!”

“Is it in pieces?” When Roan didn’t answer, Bellamy grabbed his shoulder with his right hand and shook. He then repeated himself, desperately loud: “Roan!” Nothing. He yelled: “Is it broken?!”

“I don’t think so!”

“What does that mean?”

“It looked banged up, Bellamy!” Roan admitted. “Dented and cracked. But it’s still just one piece!”

“Are you sure?” Bellamy asked. When the boy didn’t respond again, he did it again: “Roan, are you sure?” If they were going to do this, Bellamy needed to believe it could be saved. He had to.

The orbs of light that they had thrown began to flicker, extinguishing themselves one by one until the darkness returned to shroud the Whomping Willow. Bellamy and Roan still drifted overhead.

“Bellamy, I saw it.” Roan confirmed. “It’s there. We just need to get to it.”

“I believe you.” Bellamy commended. He raised his dragon bone wand while Roan raised his mahogany birch, and the boys synchronized “Lumos” and tossed the balls over again and again.

The light began to rise around them, illuminating the way back.

“So, what’s the plan?” Roan asked.

“We go in.” Bellamy answered him.

“How?”

“I’ll distract the Willow-”

“Bollocks.”

“Roan listen to me-”

“You’re not baiting yourself, Bellamy!” Roan shouted at him. “I won’t let you!”

“You’re the fastest!” Bellamy yelled, grabbing the boy’s head, firmly behind his ear at the neck: “You always have been!” He shook him lightly there, keeping their eyes focused. “You grab it.”

“Bellamy-”

“You grab it and you go. You get in and you get out and you don’t look back.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve always been the better Flyer. I can make those branches miss.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Then you better get that compass back to Harper. Or I swear I’ll haunt you.”

They hung there, in the cold air, not knowing if they were going to see each other again after this.

“Shouldn’t we exchange a final word?” Roan grinned weakly.

“Might as well.” Bellamy smiled, feeling sicker by the second.

“For Gryffindor?”

“For Gryffindor.”

And then the pair of boys zoomed towards the Whomping Willow, shouting obscenities at the tree.

Bellamy felt his eyes tear as the bitter wind tore at his face. He casted numerous “Lumos” spells and pelted them at the enormous Willow from every direction, trying not only to distract it, but to light the way for Roan to see. Bellamy dodged a swipe from one of the branches, dove over a second, and skidded with his hand, feet on the broomstick like a surfer, as he went under the third.

“Oi!” Bellamy's voice broke at the absurdity of the situation. “Over here, you ugly gash git!”

The Whomping Willow swung an enormous blow towards Bellamy, so he veered off.

“I’ve been climbing your kind all my life!”

Bellamy avoided another swipe of the branches.

“And I’ve enjoyed every second of it!”

The tree threw itself towards him, he moved again.

“Got my dirty hands and muddy feet all over the lot of them!”

He began losing his balance but shifted so that he remained on the broomstick.

“Were any of them relatives? Because I’m here to tell you! They’re not at all anything special!”

That had been how he nearly rammed into Nathan Miller, now riding atop his own broomstick, surveying the events in front of him with a look of horror and incredulity. “Have you completely cracked?”

“Nate!” Bellamy yelled, astonished at the sight. “You came for us!”

“Now I’m wishing I hadn’t!” Miller shouted and then turned to the tree. “What do we do?”

“Help me distract it! Roan’s going after the compass!”

A tormented cry ripped through the air. The two boys looked for their third and saw him flying from agitated branches. “I DROPPED IT!” Roan screeched aloud. “I FLOATING DROPPED IT!”

Roan fumbled with the handle of his broomstick and lost his balance during his escape. He sank, his hands clutching at the wooden handle holding him up but letting go once the branches returned.

“You’ve got to be floating me!” Miller screamed as Bellamy charged forward at breakneck speed. “Bellamy!”

Bellamy grabbed Roan’s empty broomstick, still levitating in the air, and pointed his dragon bone wand at its lengthened point. “Incendio!” He shouted again and again alongside it. “Incendio!”

Harper always taught Bellamy and Roan the same spells, even if they had been at different times.

Roan’s broomstick caught ablaze, the flames licking down the span of it, towards the bottom. Bellamy clutched the only part of the wood that wasn’t on fire. He raised the flaming broom in his hand and rushed towards the Whomping Willow. The glow and warmth of the flames on his face.

“What the devil are you doing?!” Miller shouted after him.

“Stealing the fire!” Bellamy yelled back and he hurled the broomstick like a fire-blessed javelin.

The spear of light struck the Whomping Willow and shattered. Flames began spreading, blanketing it in a burgeoning inferno. The tree never made any cries or screams of agony, never signified noises that suffering had been inflicted upon it. But it moved viciously, vindictively, and violently.

Roan was struggling to get up, clutching his sides as he attempted to move. But when Bellamy had done that to the Whomping Willow, he stopped what he was doing and just watched. Watched the enormous tree twist and turn its branches and limbs, trying desperately to kill what was near it.

“ROAN!” Miller bellowed. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? MOVE YOUR ARSE!”

The long-haired boy started running. His legs churned like a motor as he tried getting away. But the Willow was having none of that, and a smoldering log of a bough struck him in the side. Roan flew into the air before landing with a sickening crunch. He started screaming in pain afterwards.

“NATE! HELP ME BURN IT!” Bellamy roared. “WE NEED TO BURN IT DOWN!”

Both boys brandished their wands and flung “Incendio” after “Incendio” at the Whomping Willow, the fire smothered its branches and limbs and trunk. Bellamy dove downwards, willing his broom to move faster and faster before it was too late. Before the best friend he had in the world left him.

Going to a place he couldn’t follow willingly.

Bellamy reached Roan, while the long-haired boy crawled backwards, screaming out “Incendio” and “Incendio” as well. He sported several burns and one disturbingly broken arm. Roan cradled his misshapen limb to his chest while firing off his birch mahogany wand with the other. Bellamy rolled his broom to him and Roan spat: “Wingardium Leviosa,” flicking his remaining good wrist.

Roan tucked the mahogany birch wand between his teeth and caught the broom that had just lifted with his one free, good hand.

Bellamy had done that because only he had seen it. The compass lying at the foot of the burning Willow. The brightness of the fire revealed a dented silver frame and a fractured glass face, but a black glass needle looked to be spinning repeatedly. It still worked. Bellamy advanced towards it, sprinting faster than a galloping derby horse.

“BELLAMY! COME BACK!” Roan hollered. “GET BACK YOU MAD MOTHER-FLOATER!”

The Whomping Willow attempted a full-frontal body slam, bending its trunk and sinking its flaming frame at the boy running right at it, roaring with the wind. Bellamy slid just under its massive assault, hearing everything behind tear asunder and bury deeper and deeper into the earth.

He pointed his dragon bone wand out in front of him and called out:

“Wingardium Leviosa!” Bellamy flicked the wrist of his hand the way Harper had shown him.

Bellamy swiped the compass when it popped up in midair and started racing back towards Roan, who waited for him on the broom, chanting his name, willing to fly with one hand. And amidst the light of a burning, dying tree and the call of their friend, Miller, raining “Incendio”s from up above, he cursed.

Again, and again, and again.

Bellamy cursed out every imaginable swear word he knew, every single one he heard Kane and Jaha use and Roan and Miller mutter under their breaths every time he managed to best them at new Flying tricks. Because Bellamy knew what was going to happen to them. When he had reached Roan and swung his leg over the side and urged him to go, Bellamy knew the tree would hit them.

The broomstick beneath them shattered into a dozen wooden pieces, the splinters and the straw that bound all the magic together scattered all around them. Bellamy and Roan soared through the air and hit the ground and felt the wind get knocked out of their lungs. They tumbled and rolled, grunting past grass and dirt and rock down the hill that the Whomping Willow had lived atop of.

And the world that had been so bright and loud before became so very dark and quiet afterwards.

Miller had hurried to their side, dismounting his own broom and stammering “Lumos” so he could assess the damage, because the three of them were now so far away from the burning tree’s light.

“Bloody hell.” Miller grimaced towards the two of them. “This is one brilliant mess of a bad time.”

The light of Miller’s redwood wand revealed three shards of shattered wood embedded in different parts of Bellamy’s right leg. Blood seeped into the fabric of his pants and soaked his robes. Two nasty cuts glistened as well, one on his forehead and one on his cheek. Roan still had the broken arm, which looked grotesque, bent and crooked in a way no human limb should be bent. The burns along his neck and face resembled the burns on Bellamy’s left leg and back, only Roan's outnumbered his. Miller gagged.

The pain felt unimaginable for the two boys on the ground, like nothing they had ever felt before.

“Please say we got it.” Roan moaned, his thin frame shook erratically. Bellamy knew that sign, beginning tells of a trauma over what they had gone through. “Please say that this wasn’t all for nothing.”

“We got it.” Bellamy groaned, his own agony ripping into him. “See?” He moved to show him Harper’s mother’s compass, banged up but not broken. “It’s okay.” Bellamy held the cool silver to Roan’s forehead like it was an ice bag. “You did it, mate. You did it. There’s a lion in you yet.”

Bellamy held Roan while he vomited all over the earth between them, held him as he cried about how he thinks he pissed his pants. Bellamy cried back, admitting that the same thing happened to him, that he could feel it soaking his drawers. But Miller didn’t say a word. He pulled the wood out of Bellamy’s leg, offering his sleeve for him to bite on and bandaged him up as best he could. Miller’s redwood wand pointed at the bloody leg, tightening the fabric to stem the bleeding.

Roan’s broken arm was a different story because the sling that Miller conjured for him, using a gigantic piece of fabric he tore from his own robes, was the best he could do under such circumstances. Bellamy held Roan as the boy thrashed in pain, crying out curses from the robe sleeve he chewed on, because every piece of themselves hurt that much. Then they began limping.

Limping back through the Hogwarts grounds, back towards the castle and its gleaming windows.

Miller stood like a solid boulder in the middle, he carried the weights of both the boys from either side of him with his arms and shoulders. Roan limped to the left side of him, cradling his broken arm, and stumbling every now and then from the pain. Bellamy limped on his right side, holding the compass tightly in his right hand.

The lone surviving broomstick remained at the base of the hill below the burning Willow.

Forgotten.

“This is a one-way trip.” Bellamy warned, when he saw Miller leave it behind. “You should go.”

“You can still get away.” Roan insisted. “We’ll both be facing the gallows once this is all over.”

Miller shook his head, his movement gruff and his voice sharp: “A broom won't hold the three of us.”

And when the school had noticed. When someone, either student or Professor or ghost or portrait or even poltergeist, noticed that the Whomping Willow had been set ablaze, everyone started coming out: from the Professors to the students. The boys saw Professors Pike and Byrne rush down the hill towards the burning tree in the distance, Hagrid the groundskeeper following them closely behind.

The weight of what they had just done slowly began to dawn on Bellamy. There was no coming back from this, they would be crucified for destroying such a treasured piece of Hogwarts history.

They would probably never be allowed to come here ever again.

“Listen to me.” Bellamy insisted, as they made their way towards the crowd of congregating students in the courtyard of the school castle. “The both of you. Just listen to my voice right now.”

Roan and Miller wearily grunted, willing their tired bodies to continue taking steps forward.

“We’re brothers.” Bellamy said quietly, gripping them tightly. “Remember that, if nothing else.”

Miller nodded and Roan snorted, but they squeezed him right back with whatever they could offer.

And then the trio of boys found Raven Reyes holding a protective arm around the shoulders of one Harper McIntyre. Who had bloodshot red eyes beneath thick glasses, puffy bags underneath each one, and a runny nose that sniffled with every breath. Deep in the crowd, flanked by Fox and Monroe who held them tight as well. The other girls around them gasped and whispered and pointed at the sight of these boys.

Bellamy broke off to limp towards the girls who mattered.

“It still works.” Bellamy gently placed the compass into Harper’s hands and squeezed. “It didn’t break.” He nodded and winked at the shocked look on her face, succeeded in hiding from her how much blood was actually in his mouth. "Take care of her for us." Bellamy instructed to Raven, Fox, and Monroe, before he limped back to Miller’s side to help support Roan’s body. The three boys helped themselves through the main doors of oak.

When Bellamy saw Clarke Griffin, he squirted a stream of that same blood, the one he had been trying so hard to hide from before, in her direction from his mouth. And then he smiled a bloody smile at her, his own kind of feral, because that was all he had to say.

Headmistress McGonagall looked at the three boys with a look of pure fury and shock. But she wasn’t the one they wanted. They looked to her side and recognized a familiar face in the crowd.

“Madame Pomfrey!” Nate Miller shouted to the nurse, part of the group the three of them met in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Pride laced every word in his voice: “We’re back!”

“It’s us again!” Roan Azgeda bellowed with the bravado of a madman: “Your Broken Lion Boys!”

“And we’re finished!” Bellamy Blake roared, like the lion of Gryffindor would: “We’re finished!”


	9. Coat Of Arms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raven shows her wings. 
> 
> "Wings" by Birdy

The tale of the Broken Lion Boys would last throughout the rest of winter, well into late spring.

But the ballad: the fictionalized embellishment of how they banded together and burned down the Whomping Willow would last for generations and generations of students to come.

Some said Roan Azgeda used Parseltongue to call forth snakes from the Forbidden Forest to help.

Others swore Nate Miller, a closeted Animagus, changed to a warhorse to ride the boys out of there.

Only one, Peeves the Poltergeist, proclaimed that Bellamy Blake threw a spear of fire at the tree.

No matter how twisted the facts became, only one universal truth remained whole.

The Broken Lion Boys joined the ranks of legendary troublemakers who made a mockery of the rules when they themselves attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in their youth.

The Marauders. The Weasley Twins. The Golden Trio. And now them.

Raven Reyes remembered how hectic the night became when all three boys returned.

Looking as if hell itself draped them in a wardrobe of brimstone and hellfire. Exhausted. Resigned. But fearless and proud despite it all.

The Professors ordered the House prefects to escort all students away from the scene.

A tearful Harper McIntyre pushed her way through the crowd, eager to protest but after one no-nonsense glare from the Headmistress, Fox and Monroe ushered her away. Raven joined them too.

However, some students, the Ravenclaw included, casted numerous “fly-on-the-wall” spells over the main entrance and stairs. She informed the three Gryffindor girls on what happened later on:

Headmistress McGonagall, Madame Pomfrey, and Madame Hooch then escorted the three boys to the Headmaster’s Office, where a medical triage allegedly awaited thanks to the nurse’s magic.

Professors Pike and Byrne and Hagrid the groundskeeper returned, covered in soot and sweat. They had just finished putting out the fire and followed soon after, looking bewildered and drained.

Then an Auror by the name of Marcus Kane arrived, followed soon after by a member of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol named David Miller. The pair of them sprinted up the staircase.

Nothing happened for the longest time after that. Filch guarded the staircase with Mrs. Norris.

Until Queen Nia arrived wearing an emerald cocktail dress accompanied by half a dozen relatives.

The entourage stormed past the Squib defending the pathway to the Headmaster’s Office, looking at him with contempt and silently daring him to resist. Filch remained quiet. It was a wise choice.

And then a storm of reporters appeared, from three different, rivaling newspaper offices. The journalist Rita Skeeter was among them, accompanied by a gaggle of representatives from the Daily Prophet, the Wizarding World News, and the Quibbler who were all there vying for a scoop.

Filch valiantly held them off, brandishing an ugly-looking mace and swinging back at them wildly.

Until the front oaken doors of Hogwarts loudly erupted. The reporters and the caretaker quieted.

An old and wild-looking man, with a salt-and-peppered manbun and beard, sauntered towards the crowd, which dispersed and recoiled at both the sight and smell of him. He looked to be dressed in a boiled leather jacket lined with tattered wolf fur and carried with him a dead and mutilated Grindylow skewered on a nasty, four-barbed fisherman’s hook. A blackish blood trailed behind it.

Filch shakily pointed where to go and cringed when the man slapped his face with approval.

It would take four days after the night’s events until Raven learned the identity of that final man.

Theo Azgeda, grandfather to the pureblooded clan and thought to be either dead or self-exiled.

He had come to take responsibility for his grandson. According to the rumors around the school after the events of said night, Roan had been disowned by his mother Queen Nia for his actions because his behavior dishonored the Azgeda clan name and the reputation of the Slytherin House.

Nothing else happened in the night. Filch managed to fend off the reporters before leaving as well.

But they heard it summarized the next day. Conversational snippets from the Headmaster’s Office.

Thanks to an eavesdropping Peeves: Headmistress McGonagall apparently heard talk from everyone. The boys’ reasons for missing the Thanksgiving feast, illegally leaving on three stolen school broomsticks, and burning down the Whomping Willow, a notable piece of school property. She heard the apologies from two families, save Queen Nia and her people who angrily left the meeting midway and Theo Azgeda who remained laconic, and promised harsh consequences. It should be mentioned that McGonagall also heard each of the three boys demanding sole blame for the craziness that happened. Apparently, none of them wanted to see each other take the rap for it.

McGonagall had sighed and shook her head, rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. When Madame Hooch and Madame Pomfrey tried blaming themselves for not foreseeing the debacle…

…Minerva McGonagall silenced them. The three of them had experienced far too much together.

So, the boys’ punishment would be decided later down the road. The night already ended long ago.

The Broken Lion Boys were taken home, away from Hogwarts, by their respective guardians. All their school trunks in Gryffindor were taken back home as well. As far as the other students knew, the three boys had neither been expelled nor were they allowed to continue any of their classes.

It was an ellipsis on things to come, the damage control and public scrutiny to be managed.

All three boys’ disappearances for the entirety of December seemed like a martyrdom of sorts.

Because the very next day, Headmistress McGonagall gathered the students of Hogwarts into the Great Hall, from all four of the Great Houses, and made an assembly of the afternoon. She talked of fairness and justice and the morals of human decency and how in all her years of teaching at this school, she had seen it all. The good. The bad. The grayness in between. She endured it all.

But the hardest for her to stomach, even after all this time, had been the bystanders.

Those who saw dishonesty and unkindness being done unto others and refused to act, to intervene.

She blamed herself most of all for not seeing.

Even though there was no proof of any outright bullying, Headmistress McGonagall was appalled by the things that had supposedly been going on underneath her nose. Her students’ cruelty would now stop. All Head of House Professors would keep a closer eye on their House members. Professor Pike looked towards Gryffindor, Professor Byrne looked towards Hufflepuff, Professor Sinclair looked towards Ravenclaw, and Professor Franco looked towards Slytherin. Each of the Great Houses were deducted five hundred points.

The uproar that followed was nothing short of rebellion.

After all, Gryffindor had been the House to burn down the Whomping Willow. Why should the other Houses be punished for the misdeeds of one? To which McGonagall replied, once upon a time Hogwarts stood united against the darkness during a time of great sorrow and war. Many innocent lives were lost, some of them students, others brave wizards and witches trying to fight.

Their deaths would be honored. Their school would not fall into another cycle of anger and hate.

The Second Wizarding War had already stolen enough. It would not claim another generation.

Besides, the bravest man she had known to fight or would ever fight for justice and law and order had been a victim of bullying. Had suffered the same way as some of her students were right now.

He lived as a Slytherin but died as a Gryffindor.

No one had to be reminded of who that man was. Everyone knew about the Half-Blood Prince.

Headmistress McGonagall wiped tears from her eyes. She faced them all, fierce and tall and proud.

To restore the bonds of old, to keep the love and peace that saved them, they would all be punished.

Because a school needed to be as strong as the teachers and students that made up its numbers.

And if they divided themselves in hate, instead of bonding in acceptance, they deserved to fall.

The students who stood by and watched the malice of others, the nasty rumors that circulated the corridors and hallways, and the elusiveness of those who escaped detection were just as to blame. It had not been the first-time this year that such instances were now brought to her attention, bullies were everywhere, from Gryffindor and Ravenclaw to Hufflepuff and Slytherin. This was a fight.

A fight that would continue not only for the rest of the year, but for all years to come in Hogwarts.

Raven Reyes never heard an adult woman talk as passionately as Minerva McGonagall that day.

Not even her aunt, who fell off the wagon yet again and now recovered in St. Mungo’s rehab.

Raven remembered the last time she saw her aunt, bug-eyed and screaming: “I never wanted you!”

“You’re theirs! You belonged to them, not me!” Her aunt ranted as the medical witches and wizards came into their estate to take her away, dragging her unto the medical carriage with a bright, red Rod of Asclepius painted onto the side.

“There isn’t a place that’ll take you!” Those words had haunted her thoughts the most at night.

That had been at the beginning of the summer this year and Headmistress McGonagall found out about her recent, sensitive situation that needed rectifying for she had no one else to look after her.

Raven would be alone for the duration of the summer. No one would be bringing her to King’s Cross.

Even though Raven insisted to McGonagall that this was not the first time this happened, and she knew the drill. She knew how to take care of herself. She learned to cook, tidy up, and manage the whole estate.

She taught herself those things long ago.

Raven Reyes never asked for charity and she didn’t plan on starting now. Money was never an issue. It was getting to Hogwarts that she worried about. She looked forward to attending for years.

It was where her parents had apparently gone to learn their magic.

Raven said she would manage, but one look from Headmistress McGonagall put her in her place and shut her right up.

The veteran Professor and war hero escorted her to Diagon Alley for school supplies and textbooks.

Raven arrived in Hogwarts before any other student had. She waited three months for all of them to come.

In the meantime, she explored the Hogwarts grounds, studied her books, and juggled working on several projects and schematics at a time.

Raven worked with metal the most. She took over the workshop next to the Potions dungeon in Hogwarts, holed up for days on end. There was always Muggle objects and tools located there, in enormous junk piles in the back, courtesy of previous generations. Raven took her pick of the mess.

That had always been the thing about Raven, she always knew how to talk to metal. There was just something about the cool, rugged, sturdy earth that spoke her kind of language. She always knew how to fix broken things, how to ask them all what was wrong and why they were in pain?

It always came natural to her. Which was why she wasn’t surprised about the nature of her wand.

The heart of a star spat into the earth from the sky. A meteorite with pockets of magic inside of it.

Apparently, it was the first metallic wand of its kind and it had been made specifically for her.

Metal was her music. The magic, accompanying its roughness, was like any other that the witches and wizards of their world knew of. Spells and incantations, glyphs and runes and sigils, the minds and the souls and the hearts of everything magical were nothing but songs waiting to be heard.

The songs inside of them all. The ones worth singing for those willing to listen.

Raven tried contacting her aunt, tried letting her know she made it to Hogwarts safe and sound and how she was already hard at work. Ready to make her proud of her by doing very good in school.

Every owl Raven sent, every single letter she wrote to her aunt chronicling her current studies, ideas, and newest innovations were met with a red, “Return-To-Sender” stamp. Even the packages she sent containing her inventive projects: little tinkering Muggle toys she enchanted to distract her, to make her feel better about checking herself in after so many failed attempts at staying sober.

It was never a secret for Raven, the reasons why she enjoyed doing what she did, what she loved. Raven treasured her ability to study puzzles and find their solutions. She loved the thrill of it. To uncover their secrets and prove their answers. The greatest puzzle Raven ever faced was her aunt.

Raven always asked herself these fundamental questions:

Why was her aunt always in so much pain?

Why did her aunt always shrug away from her hugs and shy away from her kisses?

Why didn’t her aunt love her the way Raven loved her back?

The answer was never there for her to grasp. So, she solved other puzzles just to work towards it.

It was practice. Experience. The easier the solution, the shorter the path, the better she became.

Every puzzle she solved brought her closer to the one that mattered the most: how to fix her family.

Which was why Harper McIntyre’s request to fix her own mother’s compass was such a revelation.

The Gryffindor girl shared the same ambition as her, only she wanted to fix a family heirloom.

Because Harper loved her entire family. Because they meant everything to her and she wanted them to smile.

Raven watched Harper. Watched her explain concepts, persevere against unforeseen obstacles, and work passionately towards it. It was like looking into a reverse-pensieve, with an opposite effect.

As if she were watching future memories instead of past ones. A future she wanted to exist.

The compass had been such a complicated matter, a problematic and time-consuming challenge.

That Raven couldn’t resist the lure, the temptation to test her wits against it. To test her strength.

Not to mention Harper brought with her two hopeless bungholes whose antics made her feel warm inside. Fox and Monroe were some of the oddest people Raven ever met. And she liked them a lot.

Weird as they were.

“I think it was destiny that you were sorted into Ravenclaw!” Fox blurted out during that week they shared, working very hard on the compass. She sat on a desk, feet dangling and head bobbing.

“What do you mean?” Raven asked, wiping sweat off her forehead. She had finished another rune.

“Your name is Raven.” Monroe answered after fishing out a whetstone, to re-sharpen the scalpel Raven had been using for carving runes into the compass edges, from a box of materials in the center.

“I know that: Raven and Ravenclaw.” Raven turned to her next, hands on her hips. “Coincidence.”

“Raven Reyes and Ravenclaw?” Fox said this to her as if she were a simpleton who needed to be told why fire was hot and ice cold: “All of them start with the letter ‘r’. AND you’re wicked smart.”

“Not as smart as Harper.” Monroe bragged, sticking her tongue out and teasing off a ‘meh’ noise.

“Zoe!” Harper jumped, her head hitting the bottom of the desk she laid under, drawing chalk runes.

“Yeah, you’re no match for our girl!” Fox hyped, pulling an eyelid down and showing her own tongue. She tried to look intimidating. Even adding a vehement “duh” at the end.

“Fox!” Harper rubbed the back of her head, muttering a ‘shite’ before saying: “You two! Be nice!”

Both of her companions laughed and nodded. Then the two traded off finger pistol shooting noises.

“I’m sorry.” Harper apologized to Raven, looking mortified. “They’re out of control sometimes.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Raven smirked. Ever since meeting the three of them, she began feeling lighter, warmer.

Professor Sinclair, the Head of Ravenclaw and her favorite teacher after Professor Longbottom, always told her the hardest puzzles were the loneliest things in denial. Preferring to be alone, isolated from the rest of the world, all to hide their true meanings underneath insecurities, shame.

But they hated to be alone.

The paradox was an unsolvable puzzle in that regard. It was the puzzle that puzzled itself.

Sinclar’s examples were why Metallurgy had been her most favorite subject, after Herbology.

Raven didn’t like being alone. She had the respect of her House mates. But she felt she did better.

Flying solo.

During the summer, Professor Sinclair and Headmistress McGonagall had been the only adults who watched over Raven during those three long months. They, alongside the ghosts and portraits and the tosser Peeves the Poltergeist, kept her company. Along with Filch and Mrs. Norris, as well as Hagrid and all the beasts he cared for in the bowels of the Forbidden Forest. She loved them all.

Professor Sinclair talked with Raven while she ate with him and Headmistress McGonagall at the head table in front of the other, gigantically long tables belonging to the Four Houses. Filch, Hagrid, and Mrs. Norris had gone towards Hogsmeade together, eager for a night to themselves.

“How are you managing?” Sinclair asked gently, he just speared a boiled potato.

Raven had a full mouth, but she remembered her manners. She finished chewing and swallowed.

“The screws are the hardest part.” She said. “I’m trying to find an easier way of undoing them.”

“Muggles use something called a ‘screwdriver’. Maybe you should try it out on the spyglass?”

“It takes too much time. I’m working on a way to get them all out at the same time!”

Raven then scooped a piece of pigeon pie into her mouth and groaned appreciatively at the taste.

McGonagall watched the two of them from the comfort of her Daily Prophet. The semblance of a smile could be seen, directed towards the young girl. Sinclair caught her eye and beamed, nodding.

“You shouldn’t rush, you know.” He insisted. “You still have a long while before they all come.”

“I know that!” Raven exclaimed. “But I want to be ready. There’s no telling what’ll come next!”

Professor Sinclair always watched over her, even when McGonagall was too busy with her own duties. Raven sometimes suspected that the Headmistress asked teachers to come watch over her.

For the entirety of summer. Possibly to take turns supervising. She asked and asked and asked.

No one else seemed to have volunteered, except Sinclair. He was all she had, and Raven knew that.

After the Thanksgiving feast and the chaos that happened during it, things changed.

December suffered several snowfalls. Neither blizzards nor snow flurries, but cold and white and plenty in between. Classes went on, Professors continued teaching, and students kept attending.

After Bellamy Blake, Roan Azgeda, and Nathan Miller burned down the Whomping Willow, there were a series of pranks that began setting off all over the school, driving Filch mad. There were no culprits suspected of doing the various jokes and misdeeds now. But Raven already knew who they were.

Jasper Jordan and Monty Green. Two fellow Ravenclaws, smart as whips themselves, but slackers to a fault. They were lazy and unmotivated, perfectly happy with skating by classes with average grades. But these boys were tricksters at heart. And they hero-worshipped those particular Gryffindor boys.

To them, those three beat them to the punch and set an impossibly high bar to follow.

That didn’t mean the Ravenclaw boys didn’t try jumping it. It just meant they always fell short.

Raven took it upon herself to watch over Harper, Fox, and Monroe. She felt an enormous amount of guilt over what happened. After all, she had not been there to protect her three friends when Clarke Griffin and her Slytherin girls attacked, she had not been there to stop the spark that started the fire. Raven took Bellamy's final words to heart. The order had a finality to it, and the solemn look he gave them spoke measures to the seriousness of his request. Harper was their responsibility now. Zoe and Fox understood that just as much as she did. 

Clarke Griffin was, without a doubt, the scariest thing that she saw slither into Hogwarts. Extremely intelligent and ruthlessly cunning, she had a scary resolve: I will have my way, one way or another. I will have it. Raven enjoyed challenging her during their classes, but soon found out:

Raven didn’t know the Slytherin girl’s exact damage, but she knew she was a very dangerous puzzle.

She insisted that the Gryffindor girls store their most prized possessions into her personal safe in Ravenclaw Tower. Raven had heard about the spies in their House, as well as the rumors that there were traitors in the others as well, hers included. She didn’t know what Clarke had done to them.

Raven didn’t know what kind of leverage was worth betraying your fellow House-mates. And she didn’t want to know. Some truths needed to remain buried. It would keep her up at night anyways.

The safe was her proudest creation at summer’s end. Raven carved and casted more than two dozen bindings and spell incantations each all over its entire, sturdy frame. She even bonded the tension of a portcullis chain, snaked in a pile underneath the workshop’s Muggle junk pit where she found the safe in the first place, to its hinges when in locked down mode. It took her three months to concoct the security device, but she had those.

Raven lived there for those three summer months. She had plenty of time to trial and error things.

Harper stored her family’s compass, after she repaired the exterior damages: glass and silver all, inside of it. Bellamy had been right. It still worked, and it hadn’t broken. He and the boys saw to that: its safe return to her. Raven’s safe was uncrackable and she knew no other Ravenclaw dared.

There were times, after their classes finished, when Raven played with Harper, Fox, and Monroe in the snows outside of the castle walls. There had been a strict crackdown on all bullying, so there was no need to fear any reprisals from anyone, Slytherins included. But Raven felt better being near the lot of them, she owed them that much at least. And over time, she began enjoying it.

Spending more time with Harper and her girls was worth more than the entire week they shared together.

Every now and then, Raven would catch Harper looking out wistfully into the distance.

Once Fox and Monroe began a snowball war that escalated when they tackled one another and rolled down the snowy knoll near the Great Lake, where they ate their lunches in the fall. Raven had been made an honorary member, always welcome and encouraged to attend. The two girls were covered in snow, and Raven joined them as well. But Harper stayed behind, holding a snowball.

Her cheeks and nose looked cherry red beneath her thick glasses and Gryffindor beanie. Harper looked away and beyond.

She was thinking of the boys who fought for her. Harper never said a word about it, McGonagall had heard her side of the story anyways. But Raven could tell. She was always good at figuring out the puzzles.

When the girls talked about Christmas, sharing their plans for their families, and making plans to meet up over winter break, they looked towards Raven who shrugged and admitted she’d be alone.

Raven told Professor Sinclair about Harper’s offer after Metallurgy class, the week before Christmas break. She had invited Raven to spend Christmas with her and her family at their farm.

“You should go.” Professor Sinclair smiled at her, nodding excitedly. “Tell her you’re coming.”

“I can’t.” Raven ran her fingers along the ivory and onyx merged brooch that Sinclair had been working on for the upcoming MACUSA and Ministry of Magic alliance celebration. He was given the prestigious honor to not only create an artifact but bestow it to both leaders: Hermione Granger and Samuel G. Quahog. Sinclair was the greatest Metallurgy worker today. He could work anywhere, but instead he chose teaching. The Professor told Raven it had always been his dream.

“Why not?”

“Because we barely know each other.”

“So?” Sinclair voiced out another incantation that added another embroidery to the metal beneath both substances. “That’s the point of holiday gatherings, Raven. People get to know one another.”

“We’re not even friends.” Raven muttered, looking away. “All I did was help fix her compass.”

“Raven, I’ve seen you smile more these last couple weeks than the whole summer you spent here.”

“You won’t be there.” She dug the toes of her shoes at intersections in the tiled floor. “I’m scared.”

Sinclair gave her a tired smile. He bent down to her level, so that their eyes faced each other, and showed her the brooch he worked tirelessly on in between his classes. The metal sang with magic.

“This is me.” Sinclair pulled the onyx part of the brooch away from the other side, the metal separated with the texture of soft cheese under sunlight and pointed the ivory to her: “This is you.”

He had told her the MACUSA and Ministry of Magic alliance happened after the Second Wizarding War. It was why Great Britain celebrated Thanksgiving and why America celebrated Boxing Day. The magic that bonded the pact, in which they would come to each other’s aid during times of great conflict, would be sealed by a trade agreement: an equal celebration of two precious holidays by both regions of the world.

The idea had been Hermione Granger’s, and both Wizarding World communities applauded the witch’s willpower and wisdom to see the deal through to the very end for both country’s’ benefits.

“Each part of the brooch belongs to a different person.” Sinclair explained. The two separate pieces of the brooch served as one, individual brooch when singular. However, when the Professor brought them closer to one another, they bonded into one. “But when they return, they reunite.”

The ivory and onyx metal brooches joined together as one. They fit each other like jigsaw pieces.

“The same goes for you and me.” Sinclair smiled at Raven. “Wherever we are, wherever we go.”

Raven threw her arms around him and wept. It was the first time she’s cried since her aunt had left her.

“You and me will always be.” Sinclair whispered to her, hugging her back just as hard.

In class, Professor Sinclair treated her like any other student rain or shine. But alone, he was family.

Harper held Raven's hand when she introduced her family to one of her closest friends from Hogwarts.

The McIntyre family farm was a sight to behold during Christmas time. Mr. McIntyre, a Canadian who traveled to Great Britain for company work but remained all the same, draped the farmhouse in decorations and lights. Harper told Raven he insisted on doing it all by hand cause of tradition.

All four witches helped as well, though they snuck a spell or two in there when he wasn’t looking.

Harper and Raven chased each other around the snowy banks and charmed together miniature snow giants who danced, charged, and sumo-wrestled. They built snow forts with their own hands.

Raven heard tales of the McIntyre girls from all over Hogwarts. There were almost always two schools of thought when it came to them. Those who loved them and those who despised them.

She suspected the girls who hated the McIntyre girls were jealous of their looks and popularity.

But they were beautiful and free-spirited and very kind to Raven when Harper introduced them.

They acted as if they were her sisters. Harper gave Raven a toothy grin when they complimented her friend’s looks and politeness, especially towards their youngest sister. It was quite the surprise.

But it hadn’t been the biggest one.

That belonged to the way Harper’s mother welcomed her daughter’s new friend with open arms. Raven never knew her birth parents, least of all her own mother. They were gone by the time Raven had grown enough to understand the form and function of a nuclear family. Her aunt had said they were long dead, but Raven always believed there was more to the story than she let on.

It was another puzzle she vowed to solve. But that was a story for another time.

Cooper McIntyre felt like how a mother should feel. Warm, smelling like home-baked goodness.

The white chocolate macadamia nut cookies she served the girls, along with hot cocoa and lullaby-singing marshmallows, when they returned inside from the cold were evidence of that.

It wasn’t too long before an additional person arrived to join the McIntyre ranks for the holidays.

Charmaine Diyoza, best friend to Roma McIntyre, who grew up alongside her during their time at Hogwarts, had recently returned from traveling abroad. Everyone there had called her ‘Charlie.’

Cooper treated her like a surrogate daughter as well, hugging her and fussing over her appearance.

The older girl looked just as beautiful and wild as the McIntyre women, only she sported a more delinquent-esque look with a savage streak of crimson etched into her raven black hair. She had an arm sleeve tattoo of scaly feathered beasts, sea monsters, thorny roses, as well as dreamcatcher and wind-chime earrings. Charmaine Diyoza had been treated just like any other family member.

She even shared a fire whiskey shot with Mr. McIntyre, which was the only magical alcohol he liked drinking. The enormous man laughed heartily after that, kissed his wife and chanted aloud:

It was good to have their whole family home.

Charlie was just as wild as the older McIntyre girls, mainly because she was Roma’s age. Only she treated Bree and Harper as her younger sisters as well, grabbing them close and kissing them on both cheeks. After she had been introduced to Raven, Charlie pulled the girl close, smelling like mountain woods because she had returned from visiting the Himalayas, and whispered to her:

“You’re going to love it here.” The unofficial McIntyre smiled. “I used to spend Christmas alone.”

Raven nodded softly at that, but the older girl only hugged her tighter.

“They gave me a home when I didn’t have one.” Charlie told her quietly. “They gave me a family.”

Charlie smiled at her and kissed her forehead, just like Harper had done for her back then.

“You can be a part of it too. If you let them.”

Afterwards, when Roma regaled them of the Chinese dragons she helped train in Shanghai and Bree informed them of the graduate research from Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Charlie announced her news. Harper and Raven were in the middle of a very intense game of chess.

Not Wizard’s Chess, because Mr. McIntyre preferred the old-school Muggle version that didn’t require any clean-up, but a regular, old-fashioned wooden block set with black and white colors.

“I’m going to become an Auror.” Charlie told the McIntyre’s. “I’ve already enrolled in the training.”

“Are you serious?” Cooper asked. When Charlie nodded, she exclaimed: “That’s wonderful news!”

“You’re giving up traveling the world?!” Roma cried. “But it was always your dream!”

“Well now, I want to protect people.” Charlie responded. “Someone has to keep all you beautiful people safe.”

“Aurors are quite the handsome bunch!” Bree encouraged. “You’ll have your pick of the litter!”

“I’m happy for you.” Mr. McIntyre said solemnly. He didn’t really know what it meant. But he liked how Charlie showed initiative and he liked how happy she looked. So, he applauded.

“Congratulations, Charlie!” Harper voiced out. Raven remained quiet, but she nodded as well.

Charlie thanked everyone who supported her, shooting a look at Roma who stopped herself from interrupting. It was Christmas Eve, so they decided to end the night there and go to sleep. Harper shared her bed with Raven and the two of them excitedly talked amongst themselves about tomorrow and how Fox and Monroe would be visiting to play around with them. Harper told Raven that she would tell her family about how all four of them worked together and helped each other during the fall semester. She compared all four of them to the Four Musketeers. Raven didn't even know what that was.

Sleep soon took over.

Raven had given Harper the spyglass for Christmas, the only other project she worked on for the summer because she had nothing else to offer her. It curved one’s vision when looking over obstacles and around corners from very far away. She had used it to spy on Filch whenever he rifled through the ‘confiscated drawer’ in his office. She had always been curious of the things that were left behind, the secrets that were hidden away there.

Harper smothered her with a hug, whispering how amazing it was. They took turns bending points of view towards the kitchen whenever Cooper McIntyre checked on her cooking, spying on treats.

Raven received brand new Metallurgy tools and a polished, leather belt to hold them in, that folded over in layers from her waist. It was the greatest gift she ever received. Raven hugged Harper fiercely. Wordlessly expressing her thanks.

But the best part of that whole Christmas morning was when Harper had given her mother her own present, wrapped in nothing but the skull bandana she retrieved from Cooper’s old school trunk.

The living room in the McIntyre farmhouse became very quiet after that. Roma, Charlie, Bree, and Mr. McIntyre watched with bated breath, preparing the cameras, both magical and non-magical.

Cooper McIntyre read the words. To: Ma’, From: Harper, Raven, Fox, and Zoe.

When she unwrapped her present, she whispered a watery: “Oh, Sweetie…”

Harper’s mother watched the obsidian arrow of her compass point towards the group in front of her.

Where her whole family stood, along with Raven on the side.

“I kept my promise.” Harper whispered. “Remember the hammock?”

Cooper burst into tears after that and wrapped her youngest daughter up in a tight embrace, repeating “you did it” over and over again. The rest of the McIntyre family joined them as well, Charlie pulled Raven in too.

“Thank you, Raven.” Cooper murmured to her during it all. Harper had told her how she couldn’t have done it without the Ravenclaw’s help. “Thank you for being so good and kind to my daughter.”

“It wasn’t any trouble.” Raven replied, her throat tightly wound up. “I enjoyed the puzzle is all.”

They feasted on butter and syrup-coated chocolate chip flapjacks, French toast, waffles, Eggs Benedict, sausage, bacon, eggs, corn beef hash, and a full English breakfast when they finished opening all of their presents.

“Oh yeah, that reminds me!” Bree exclaimed. “Didn’t some of the kids from Hogwarts burn down the Whomping Willow?”

Raven saw Harper’s thin body straighten, rigid as a board. She paled, and her eyes looked down.

“I heard about that madness!” Charlie laughed. “There must’ve been quite a row after that!”

Harper excused herself quietly, walked around her father, and hurried upstairs. The older girls didn’t seem to notice, but her mother and Raven had. She tried avoiding Cooper’s searching eyes.

“It was a bunch of boys!” Roma explained. “Apparently they were practicing Flying at night.”

All three girls’ voices mingled as one, it became hard to keep track of who was saying what.

“During the Thanksgiving feast!”

“They made their way to the Willow by accident!”

“One of them fell.”

“The other two starting throwing fire at it.”

“All to save their one friend.”

“How bloody mad is it that it happened while they were Flying?”

“I wonder if Harp knew who they were.” Mr. McIntyre inquired softly before halving his sausages and placing the other pieces onto Harper’s plate. Raven excused herself as well and went upstairs.

Raven found Harper crying on the side of her bed, looking out the window. Her shoulders shook with the falling of her tears. The Ravenclaw held her hand out towards the knob, the door slightly ajar by a thin crack, before she went to go wet a piece of cloth from the family bathroom nearby. When she returned with it…

…Cooper McIntyre was already sitting next to her youngest daughter, a protective arm over her.

The same kind of arm Raven held Harper with the night it all happened. She watched from afar. The crack had opened into the width of a person's big toe now.

“Who were they?” Cooper asked quietly.

“My friends.” Harper wept, leaning against her mother’s inner shoulder. “One I didn’t really know.” The young girl’s body trembled harder in her mother’s arms. “Two were my very best.”

“Did all of that have anything to do with your gift?” Her mother replied softly. “And Headmistress McGonagall’s message to your father and I after Thanksgiving?”

“I told her I didn’t want you to know!” Harper sobbed. “It would’ve ruined your present!”

“We were so worried, Harp.” Cooper sighed.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Cooper tried rocking her daughter. “Why’d they do it?”

“To help me.” Harper cried even more. “I was sad, and they wanted to make me happy. It worked.”

“Harper…”

“It’s all my fault!”

“Don’t say that, Sweetie. It’s not-”

“None of this would’ve happened if we never met!” Harper wailed. “I’ll never see them again!”

“You don’t know that.” Cooper rocked her daughter again, trying to shush her. “Harper, you don’t know that.”

“I didn’t deserve to know them!”

“You did, Harper.” Her mother said sternly and held her daughter firmly to face her. “You still do.”

Harper shook her head, but her mother held her there still.

“You deserve to know them because you are a beautiful, special, and wonderful person.” Cooper stated, as if the words were truer than any other facts on the planet. Truer than the wetness of water and the vastness of outer space. Even as Harper shook her head, her mother continued: “And they saw it.”

“Ma-”

“They saw how gentle and patient and sweet you are.” Her mother squeezed her. “And they knew.”

“Knew what?”

“They knew you were worth fighting for.”

“You weren’t there.” Harper sniffled. “You didn’t see. I didn’t do anything.”

“I didn’t have to be there to know that you were yourself.” Cooper whispered back. “I don’t have to be in Hogwarts to know how you helped them and said kind things to them. I know that already. That's who you've always been.”

Harper became quiet after that.

“You’re such a strong girl, Harper.” Her mother breathed quietly. “You’ve got such a fire inside of you. I see it every time you smile.” She kissed the top of her head. “I will never get tired of it.”

“I miss them, Ma’.” Harper whispered longingly: “I miss him.”

Cooper McIntyre kissed the top of her baby girl's head once again and hugged her some more. They silently watched the snowfall outside, side by side.

Raven returned to the bathroom. She closed the door, sat on the toilet seat, and waited for mother and daughter to eventually leave. And long after their footsteps returned downstairs, she remained.


	10. Veritas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clarke bears a great weight. 
> 
> "Silhouettes” by Of Monsters And Men

Nana’s final words to her had been: “What’s weaker than an enemy at war with itself?”

To which the blonde girl, nine years old at the time, had replied with a low, careful: “What’s-”.

Then Nana passed not long after that and she never did hear the rest of her granddaughter’s answer. Days later, Clarke Griffin realized that she herself no longer remembered what she would’ve said.

It took two days, after the funeral and wake, before they brought her down.

Clarke accompanied her grieving mother and stricken father to the catacombs under Griffin manor.

Where they buried her grandmother among the crypts and hollowed tombs of the Slytherins of old.

The place that held the pensieve, where her mother showed her that horrible memory.

Those words were what the blonde-haired tempest of a girl locked away inside her heart and continued to carry around whenever she walked through the classrooms and corridors of Hogwarts.

It felt like quite the self-fulfilling prophecy, the way Clarke’s methods and schemes, extreme and harsh as they had been, were rooted in her grandmother’s final question. Clarke hadn’t realized.

She always planned on avenging her mother’s pain and suffering the same way it occurred, with brutal efficiency and ruthless precision, only to erase everything afterwards. Except the nightmare.

Clarke struggled to keep the nightmare forever alive inside the minds of all her would-be enemies. They feared her and avoided her. Which was fine. Clarke preferred that to being scoped for attack.

But it had been more important. She realized that now thanks to her Nana: her plans had purpose.

It was all strategy. Tactics. Foreshadowing. Nothing more, nothing less. Just another chess match.

And Clarke was very, very good at chess. She preferred the magical kind, the one that broke its pieces.

Which was why she sowed deception anywhere and everywhere that had the slightest cracks in its foundations.

Nana always advised Clarke to have an entrance ready for wherever she wanted to go. She told her to invest in the gatekeepers and harvest all the key-makers. Make them yours, and you’ll never need another set.

If you wanted to break into a building, why go through the noisy ‘pick and chisel’ trouble, all dirty and sloppy and stupid, when someone on the inside could just hand you the way in from within.

The Slytherin girl began hunting for the weaknesses in her foes, for their disadvantages to exploit.

It was almost as if she were a bloodhound, only the scent she followed never went away. It was there on every Gryffindor and Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff that she toyed and twisted into her own.

And through this, Clarke learned the many ways it took not only to hurt a person but break them.

To bend them to her will.

Blackmail, the threat of violence, both magical and physical forced them all to show their secrets.

That had only been for the strongest. There were others more open to turning for the sake of reward.

Galleons. Sickles. Knuts. The latest in fashion and jewelry and sweets. All in exchange for secrets.

Secrets, according to Clarke, were currency and knowledge, just another word for power, the bank.

It did not take long before Clarke Griffin established her own personal network of eyes and ears within the three other Great Houses. She found that these spies and traitors shared common qualities.

Cowardice. Delusions of grandeur. Greed. One would think House qualities would trump these negative traits. But one would be surprised. The colors of their red, blue, and yellow sigils didn’t matter in the end.

The students in Hogwarts were human. After all, everyone had flaws. Everyone was imperfect.

Clarke’s spies informed her of everything: which Gryffindors were acting towards what, what works Ravenclaws were planning, and how organized Hufflepuffs were when planning festivities.

She knew it all ahead of time. And that’s what she excelled at. Thinking of moves ahead of everyone else.

Her grandmother had been right when she said those words: enemies were easier to deal with when they were weakened by inner strife. Sometimes blinded by the confusion and chaos. At the start, they were all too distracted with fighting amongst themselves to realize they were already losing.

And that Slytherin began winning at everything. Academics. Extra-curriculars. Social gatherings. Quidditch.

It was the perfect poison for them to play around with. Or at least, it had been.

Clarke never expected the tables to turn on her so quickly after the Thanksgiving fiasco.

Bellamy Blake, Roan Azgeda, and Nathan Miller had done more than just counter her attack against McIntyre. They undermined her plans to the point that Headmistress McGonagall became involved. Clarke still remembered the pointed look the woman shot towards her during the speech.

Disappointment and sadness filled McGonagall’s eyes. Clarke felt humiliated. She respected that woman a great deal. Even if she sympathized with the ones who wronged her and her family: Muggleborns.

Who knew Harper McIntyre could’ve inspired such reckless bravery and unconditional loyalty? Her attempt to break the girl had bitten her right back like the fangs of Salazar’s emerald serpent.

Impressive, McIntyre. Very impressive. You won this round for sure, Clarke thought.

The Muggleborn, Bellamy Blake, was more than what she thought him to be. He led those boys.

He led them to the Whomping Willow and they followed without question. For McIntyre’s sake.

To think Clarke believed him to be pureblooded, back on the Hogwarts Express. He had the aura.

But she had been wrong, just like how she was wrong now.

Of all the plays they could’ve called against her, that was one gambit Clarke did not see coming.

The suicidal necessity of it resembled that of self-sacrifice for a later game advantage during chess.

It wasn’t long before her network of eyes and ears became disrupted by the anarchy. Some of her spies refused to check in, encouraged by the defiance brewing among the other Houses against them.

The Broken Lion Boys lit the very fires of rebellion.

Which only made the inner turmoil within her Slytherin gang even more damaging. Many of them were angry at this turn of events, many blamed Clarke for her extremist behavior. She got too cocky. Too greedy.

She overextended herself and now they all had to pay the price. Dissension flooded the ranks of all her Slytherin soldiers, to the point that the only ones she could truly trust were Echo and Lexa.

Echo swore to give the fools only one chance to piss the weakness out of themselves.

Clarke’s first lieutenant had been the most furious with the girls’ insubordination and threatened them more than once with retribution. Whether Echo meant magical or physical, none of the other Slytherins knew.  
They only knew it would be violent.

They saw it that time when Echo raved at them all, brandishing her angel oak wand and aiming crazily. She overheard talks of overthrowing Clarke’s leadership, putting someone else in charge.

The tall, willowy girl screamed that she should jinx them all like the disloyal dingbats they were.

She resembled a banshee. The likeness between the two would’ve been uncanny if one was there.

“No more chances after this!” The Azgeda warned them all: “Never let me hear your filth again!”

It all boiled over when Echo attacked another Slytherin first-year girl, Dakiva, for calling Clarke a vulgar term. Which Echo had still refused to tell no matter how sternly Clarke questioned her. Echo thrusted her angel oak into the girl’s mouth and shot off a hex. The loud bang made Dakiva vomit out leeches onto the dungeon floor. When Clarke unhexed her, Dakiva tearfully apologized.

That shut up the majority, but not all of them. Not even her most loyal and scariest soldier could stem this tide of discontent. Mutinous glares and livid whispers danced around their dungeon walls.

Clarke massaged her temples. Enemies from within and enemies from without. Enemies all over.

The five-hundred-point deficit all the Houses suffered only added fuel to the fire. Even though Slytherin remained in a commanding lead over Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff, the other girls still whinged. Yes, Clarke had finally asked around about the word. She couldn’t have Bellamy lording that over her. She heard whinging: Why leave it up to chance? Why give an inch?

Why make it so that we’ve got to watch our backs all the time now?

As if we ever stopped, Clarke thought viciously. They’ve been at war ever since they landed here in Hogwarts. Pureblooded witches and wizards against everyone else. They just didn’t know it yet.

Everyone feared Slytherin. It had been what Clarke wanted back when she cut up the iguana, only it weakened them instead of strengthening their ranks. It was meant to unite them, not tear them apart.

Now she understood the receiving end of her grandmother’s question.

Slytherin was at war with itself. And if this kept up, they would become weak. Their numbers would diminish to few. They wouldn’t be able to survive the winter and everything that followed.

Lexa had voiced out her concern one night, wisely waiting for Echo to fall asleep ahead of them. Her second lieutenant crept out of her own bed and sat, pretzel-style, at the foot of Clarke’s. The brunette had a way with wearing the darkness around her. Clarke admitted it made her look Gothic.

“This is bad.” The Northwood girl said quietly. She folded her hands in her lap and stared at her.

Clarke shifted in her bed, her jade nightgown clinging all around her, so she could see: “Of course.”

“What do we do about it?”

“We wait for everything to blow over.”

“You’re joking.”

“This snag will soon pass.”

“I don’t think the others have the same kind of patience as you do at the moment.”

“They will if they know what’s good for them.”

“Do you think McGonagall told our families what happened?”

“Most likely.”

“Bloody, floating hell.” Lexa muttered, pretend-clawing her eyes out but itching them both instead.

“They will know what I’ve done.” Clarke whispered, biting her bottom, quivering lip. “My father.”

“Clarke…”

“He will know what I am.” Nothing came out. All the feelings were there, but not the tear ducts.

Clarke Griffin didn’t cry anymore. Not if she could help herself. She wanted to give it up for good.

“It will all work out. We’re okay. You’ll see.”

“I’ve been hiding away from him for so long. And I’m tired. Merlin’s beard, I’m tired of hiding.”

“You don’t have to hide away from me.” Lexa whispered. “You know that, right?”

“It’s not just hiding, Lexa.” Clarke muttered. “It’s the pretending. I have to act like someone else.”

“You don’t have to do that either. Not with me.”

“I always have to carry around these two masks. I change into one for father and one for mother.”

“And what about the one you wear for yourself?” Lexa asked. “Your real face?”

“I don’t know what that is.” Clarke confessed. “All I know is I can’t ever let myself get hurt again.”

A silence grew between them, like the reeds and thistles of a spring yet to come.

“I will not allow anyone to hurt me or mine with impunity.” The blonde-haired tempest vowed.

Lexa advanced to wrap her arms around Clarke’s body, sliding in beside her in the bed, and hugging her close. The embrace resembled her father’s bear hugs, only less rough and more loving.

“Our families love us no matter what.” Lexa quietly declared. “It’s why they’re called families.”

“You’re my family too.” Clarke softly admitted. “You and Echo are the only family I need here.”

There had been a time when she didn’t feel that way. When Clarke used to see them both as lesser.

But that was before. Before everything that was happening now.

Now Clarke believed these two girls were more than just Slytherin soldiers.

They were her angels of war. Only they ferried the souls felled by her own hands. Instead of theirs.

Their bond had transformed into that of sisterhood.

“Echo will never betray us.”

“You think?”

The two Slytherin girls laughed softly at that. They loved their loyal mad dog, crazy as she was.

“Your mother will be proud of you, Clarke.” Lexa assured.

“I don’t think so.” Clarke bit her bottom lip again in deep thought.

“She will.”

“My mother told me to keep a low profile. It’s safe to say I ruined all of that.”

“You didn’t ruin anything.”

“Everyone here hates what we are.” Clarke turned over in her bed, keeping her back to Lexa.

“What did you expect?” Lexa tucked her nose behind Clarke’s ear. “They weren’t raised like us.”

“My mother will be angry at me for what I’ve done.”

“Any woman who teaches her daughter the first stage of their family name spell will understand.”

Only three pureblooded clans had their own unique spells linked to their blood and name. The Azgedas had one involving ice and the Northwoods had one involving wood. The Griffins controlled the air. These were the three most powerful pureblood families out there in the Wizarding World: All the Griffins and the Azgedas and the Northwoods had sworn an old blood-pact to fight for one another. Her mother, miraculously, managed to wield her father's Griffin family blood spell.

Now, Clarke only knew the first tier of her family’s name spell: the wind whip. Each one had four tiers in all. She promised Echo and Lexa she would teach them both what she had learned so far about hers if they themselves learned the first-tier stages of their respective family blood spells. She wanted them to exchange their knowledge so that they remained strong throughout the years.

By casting the blood-binding curse that bonded lineages together. So, they could use each other’s family name spells. Divided they were weak but united they would burn the world to the ground.

It was forbidden for a reason.

The unfortunate women from their families who dared attempt it caused the ruin of their houses.

Clarke had promised Echo and Lexa that their story would be different.

Harnessing the wind was how Clarke dealt with McIntyre and Monroe with ease.

She extinguished the fireplace in their Slytherin Common Room dungeon with it.

It was what allowed her to show Bellamy the sea ocean breeze, cool from the summer, on the train.

The memory of that last part left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Abigail Griffin had taught her how to summon a whip from the wind to use against her enemies after the death of her Nana. But before she learned how to wield it, she had to know what it felt like. Her mother organized a line of way stones, barely sticking out of the water of their koi pond.

Only her mother enchanted their koi pond into a pit of roaring, white river rapids.

Clarke’s father had been working late in the Ministry. For once.

The red and white fish were nowhere to be found within the barriers of the marble-ringed water.

It was too dark at night to see anyways.

“Walk across without falling in.” Abby commanded quietly. Dark rings circled her bloodshot eyes. Clarke knew her mother hadn’t been sleeping the last couple of nights. She had heard her crying.

“Mother.” Nine-year old Clarke Griffin swallowed. She stared at the rough waters. “I’m scared.”

“Walk across the stones, Clarke.” Her mother took out her bonsai tree wand. “I won’t ask again.”

Nana just died. Her mother sounded sad. This type of grief seemed normal. This would help things.

Clarke would do it. For the mother she loved and the grandmother she lost.

So, she nodded and took a timid step forward. She stood on the first stone and went for the second.

When she got there, she came for the third and then reached onto the fourth. But once on the fifth…

…Clarke felt something hard slam into the side of her face and she flew into the water. She still remembered screaming underneath it all, being tossed and turned by the waves before hitting the marble barrier. When she managed to pull herself out of the koi pond, she coughed out cold water.

“Again.” Abby ordered.

Nine-year old Clarke shook her head and clung to her shivering self. No more of this. Not ever.

“You gave up too easily.” Her mother instructed, her voice beginning to rise. “Do it again.”

She started sniffling. The tears streamed down her cheeks and blended in with the dark pond water.

The crack of a whip could be heard, the grass in front of Clarke ripped apart. It had been the wind.

“STAND UP!” Her mother screamed.

Clarke slowly rose and looked at her mother. When she saw how upset she was, she merely nodded.

The second time she went across the way stones had been just as worse. Clarke managed to make it to the sixth stone before the wind took her in the thigh. She felt her cheek scrape against one of the way stones there. The fat gash that formed on her cheek, underneath her eye, bled and swelled.

When Clarke tried to surrender again, after the third time failed, Abby choked her with the wind.

“SHOW ME!” Her mother raged. “SHOW ME WHAT YOU CAN BE FOR OUR FAMILY!”

There had been no more talk of surrender after that. Clarke carried on with the impossible task.

She bore all her mother’s savage lashes against her skin.

Clarke Griffin bore it all, so her mother wouldn’t have to do it alone.

Again, and again Clarke fell in. And again, and again, she returned. Baptized by the wet darkness.

Her proudest moment had been the tenth run because she made it to the twelfth way stone. Until her mother’s wind whip once again took her in the chest and she again soared backwards. Into the cold, dark depths that wrestled her down below. There were times Clarke feared she would drown.

“You’re weak!” Abigail Griffin spat. “Weak! You want what happened to me to happen to you?!”

The wind wrapped itself around her waist and flung her down again.

“No, Mother!” Clarke cried out, rising again from the rough pond waters. She found the koi fish.

They floated all around her. Dead. They kept on rubbing against Clarke whenever she swam back.

“Recite what you know!”

“Yes, Mother!”

It was a back and forth.

Abby questioned and wind-whipped. Clarke fell back into the water, only to rise with an answer.

And on and on it went.

“Tell me what you are!” Her mother screeched and thrashed her wand.

“Pureblood!” The daughter screamed back to her, soaking to the bone.

“Tell me what you will do once you reach Hogwarts!”

“Bring glory to Slytherin!”

“Tell me the names of all the enemies that are out there!”

“Blood traitors!” Clarke gagged. Some more water had gone down her throat again. “Mudbloods!”

“Tell me who you will become!” Abby chanted to her drenched daughter in the dwindling night.

“The greatest witch to have ever lived!” Her daughter screamed loudly. “In this life or the next!”

Afterwards, when the waters of their koi pond stilled, and the morning dawn broke in the distance, her mother cradled her battered and weary body in her arms. Abby wrapped Clarke in a white shawl, with trimmed lace at the edges. Her mother sang her spells that fixed her cuts and healed her bruises, she traced her bonsai wand at every part of her child that had been wet and dried it all.

So, her father wouldn’t see.

Then her mother showed her how to hide it, like she did after so many of their visits to the pensieve.

A few nights before this particular one happened, Abigail had shown Clarke a memory she had of her Nana when she was nine-years old herself. Clarke asked her nervously, as they descended into the dark and damp catacombs: “Is it another scary memory? Another painful one?”

Because there had been more. Abigail showed her daughter memories she accumulated over the years, collected from witches and wizards who suffered like her. Who were condemned and hunted down and, at times, killed or tortured in ways that were far worse than hell. Clarke cried and shook.

Every memory, her mother had shown her. From burning witches at the stake to hanging them from the gallows.

“No, Sweet Pea.” Abby whispered to her, gently plunging her into the smoky mist within the basin.

Nana tucked a nine-year old Abigail Griffin into her cot, smoothing out the dark fleece blanket over her. She always joked about shearing a black sheep for it, an outcast in the wild. Abby laughed whenever she told her that story. The sky was dark outside the cottage they lived in near the hamlet.

“Tell me about the ‘Escape’ again!” Abby excitedly asked. “Tell me how you left that bad place!”

Clarke saw her grandmother smile and heard her chuckle. She even felt her tuck a strand of hair, one that wasn’t hers, behind her ear before leaning in close. “You’ve heard that a thousand times!”

“That’s because it’s exciting!” Her mother had exclaimed, eyes bright. “You did it by yourself!”

“No, Sweet Pea.” Her grandmother called her mother. Clarke always knew that’s where it came from, she heard her Nana call Abby that on more than one occasion. “My father’s people helped.”

“Grandfather!” Abby chuckled. “You never talk about him to me! Not ever!”

“Because you aren’t old enough to know, Sweet Pea.” Nana said. “But I’ll tell you all of it in time.”

Nana reached out and grabbed nine-year old Abby’s crocheted doll and showed it to her. She tucked her daughter’s fingers into her hand and helped trace them around the outside of the doll.

“A homunculus.”

“A what?”

“A fake person.” Her grandmother explained. “Something made to believe it’s real when it’s not.”

“What is it made out of?” Her mother asked at the time: “The homo-the-homono-the thing.”

Nana rolled up her sleeve and showed Abby her arm. There looked to be a tattoo. One that showed: a blackened snake slithering itself outside a skull’s mouth. It looked terrifying in the candlelight.

“Blood.” Her grandmother answered her quietly. “Bits of bone and pieces of flesh. My offerings.”

“I like this part.” Abigail whispered back eagerly. “This is my favorite part of the entire story.”

“My father’s people snuck the homunculus into Azkaban.” Nana described. “Where we switched.”

“And then?”

“I left that horrible place and came here. Outside of this very village.”

“And Dad couldn’t come with you?”

“Your ‘Dad’ was a guard there.” Nana muttered vehemently. “He visited me many times at night.”

“I’m sorry.” Abigail shamefully mumbled, embarrassed she brought it up. “What happened next?”

“I had you, Sweet Pea.”

“Yes. You did.”

“Aye, I did.” Nana saw how depressed Abby looked after her mistake. She smoothed her hair and planted a soft kiss on her forehead. “You had Salazar’s blood inside of you and I loved you for it.”

“I love you too, Nana.”

“You’re the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me, Sweet Pea. Remember that, if nothing else.”

“I know.” Abby smiled up at the woman in front of her. “I will.” She then chewed her bottom lip and added another thing: “But, something happened when you left.”

“I became older than I was.”

“You told me you went there as a teenager. What happened to you?”

“Azkaban has a way of aging its prisoners when they leave, Sweet Pea.”

“How?”

“The dementors and spellbound traps inside the walls drain all the lifeforce from you. The years.”

“You always said that was a bad thing.”

“Because my father’s people were younger than me and I was older than all of them. Give or take a few years. But that only happened when I left.”

“What was your name?” Nine-year old Abby asked her own mother. “I know that it wasn’t Nana.”

“Go to sleep, Sweet Pea.” Nana urged the girl. She tucked her into bed some more. “It’s late.”

“Please tell me it, Nana.”

“Promise never to tell?”

“Promise never to tell.”

“Alright then…”

For some reason, the memory of her grandmother’s name blocked itself out of her head. Even after these two long years. Abby still taught Clarke how to conceal all the things she experienced from her father.

In the light of the morning afterwards, after her mother hit her repeatedly into the cold, dark waters. Her mother tried, like she always did after times like these, to make Clarke see all the reasons why.

“I’m sorry.” Abigail had whispered, tears in her eyes. She rocked Clarke softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“Mother...” Clarke whispered back. She didn’t want to see her mother crying anymore. “It’s okay.”

“I have to do this for you, Sweet Pea.”

“I know.”

“Because no one else will.”

“I understand.”

“You have to be ready for it all, Sweet Pea.” Abby demanded. “You strike first or you get struck.”

“I will.” Clarke promised. “I swear on Salazar’s name, I will.”

The very next night, the mother began teaching the daughter how to wield the wind like a whip.

No words were required for the incantation, the spell needed only the fury of a once tender girl.

Two years had passed since that fateful night and morning, but Clarke remembered it all the same.

Clarke returned to Griffin manor a few days before Christmas. Devoid of both her parents but filled with servants. Her room looked the same, just like she left it when she had gone to the Hogwarts Express. Not even the books in her own private collection had a speck of dust on them.

She tried to smile. But felt emptier than the room she was in. Things were weird, she felt different.

The Clarke from the end of summer would know what to do, how to occupy her time until her parents returned. The Clarke right now, who finished autumn, did not know how to move forward.

Clarke felt like Odysseus after returning home to his wife and child after twenty years lost at sea.

Bellamy had told her that story, while they gorged on pumpkin pasties and fizzing whizzbees. He gave her the abridged, short version because he said telling the whole thing would take too long.

Clarke told him she didn’t mind. The Hogwarts Express could stop moving and she’d listen.

She could listen to him talk to her always, that had been what Clarke said to him at the time.

But that was then, and this was now. Those old days were dead. And so was her memory of him.

So, Clarke went to thank her maid, kissing her on both cheeks, and went down to the kitchen to talk the time away with the chefs and footmen. She went to the garage and joked with her driver.

It would be nighttime by the time her parents returned. Her parents casted a silence charm over her room. But Clarke knew something was up, from the magic in the air, and crept out to see what.

Clarke heard them arguing and found out she had been right, McGonagall told them everything.

“You showed her that memory!” Jake Griffin shouted. “Why else would she hurt that poor girl?!”

“Of course!” Abigail Griffin screamed. “And if you loved me, you’d have let me show her sooner!”

“You promised me!”

“I promised myself first long ago!”

“What the devil possessed you to do such a thing?!”

“More than one devil, Dear. The devils that happened to me!”

“It happened to you!” Her father yelled. “It didn’t have to happen to Clarke!”

“Do you think I wanted it to happen?!” Her mother shrieked. “Clarke deserved to know the truth!”

“You mean your truth!”

“My truth is the only one that matters!”

“You had no right to do any of this!”

“I had every right! Clarke is my child!”

“That’s right! Clarke is a bloody child!”

“So was I!”

“And you made her see every stone they threw at you!”

“Would you rather she wandered into the wolves?!” Her mother raved: “Like a lost little lamb?!”

“I’d rather she enjoyed her childhood!” Her father raged: “Instead of reliving the one you lost!”

They went on and on and on until their voices turned hoarse.

“Abby, do you realize what you’ve done?” Jake croaked.

“I’ve made her stronger, Jake.” Abby rasped.

“You’ve twisted our baby girl.” Her father whispered with tears on his face. “She’s not the same.”

“She is.” Her mother muttered, gripping the kitchen counter and bowing her head. “She’s Clarke.”

“Not anymore. I don’t recognize who she is now. The girl that did those things isn’t my daughter.”

Her parents couldn’t bear to be in the same room after that. Her father lectured her for hours on end about how everyone had a role to play in the Wizarding World, magical and non-magical, and how she couldn’t just go around hurting whoever she wanted cause then there wouldn’t be balance.

And there needed to be balance or else there would be nothingness and he would lose Clarke to it.

That threat, in her father’s mind, was worse than any traumatic experience that haunted their lives.

“Avenging the past won’t justify losing the future.” Jake firmly held Clarke’s shoulders and shook.

You’re wrong, she thought. Clarke said that to him.

“I want you to focus on you and you alone.” Her father urged. “Worry about your own problems.”

When she shook her head at him, her father shook her again and again, just as urgently as before.

“Let other people worry about themselves.” Jake Griffin told her. “Living well is a kind of justice.”

So, Clarke apologized and nodded: swearing never to hurt anyone again. Even though in her heart, hidden away from the mind of her father, she believed the exact opposite. She believed in strength.

Power protected love, not the other way around. Clarke refused to believe anything else otherwise.

Throughout Christmas and the days that followed their Christmas Day, she believed in that and only that. But then she saw how her father treated her, like she was some porcelain dish just waiting to break. He asked her repeatedly if they could talk. He’d ask her if she was doing alright that day.

Even when she was sitting by the windowsill, conjuring the frost into floral designs with her wand.

Her father would ask her and even when Clarke stiffly shook her head, remaining silent, he’d insist.

They talked a lot about what she saw in her mother’s memory. Jake Griffin answered her questions.

About why they needed to be careful with their magic around Muggles ignorant to their ways and their world. Not because it was wrong, but to keep the status quo. Keeping Muggles in the dark was more important than seeking them out and hurting them. The world wasn’t ready to see them.

And it probably never would. After everything that happened in the past, in two Wizarding Wars.

A third, if it ever happened during this day and age, would mark the end of everything for them.

Her mother never said a word. It became more and more apparent to Clarke that Abby had been avoiding both her and her father. During Christmas morning and the gift exchanges that followed:

Abigail Griffin sat watching her daughter and her husband laughing and playing about from afar.

The woman quietly cradled a translucent glass goblet, bloody with cherry wine, between her fingers. She never spoke to either one of them. Even when they opened her gifts and smiled at her.

Clarke didn’t care much for what she received that Christmas. She had so many things already, it always seemed like more stuff to deal with. But she showed gratitude for new clothes and books.

For toys and sweets. The servants, her maid and the driver included, unveiled their present for her.

It was a quilt with kind words from every single one of them: stitching and re-stitching on every square. Clarke smiled at all of them, the footmen and cooks included, and rushed to their embrace.

Her parents still fought. Still slept in separate bedrooms now. Still avoided one another.

Clarke felt guilty about it all. She lamented Nana’s words now. Her family was at war with itself.

But her father assured her that nothing was her fault. She couldn’t help feeling the way she felt.

So, for the most part, Clarke felt better. Better than forcing herself to plan and plot back in school.

And there had been times, not a few but not a lot either, when Clarke began showing reluctance.

Reluctance to returning to her ways back in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

There had been such love at home, even if her mother provided none of it. Her father and all the servants were showing her so much warmth. So much acceptance. Maybe it was worth letting go.

This weight she had held inside of her heart since her mother’s stoning. Sometimes she wondered if she picked up one of the stones the Muggle children had thrown and kept it with her all these years.

Clarke didn’t know what to think of these feelings welling up inside of her. They were an unknown.

All she knew was that the two masks she’d been carrying for the sake of her parents felt so heavy.

They’ve always felt so heavy to her. She wanted to let them both go. And stomp them into pieces.

But she knew, one of these days, that she would have to make a choice between the faces she wore.

So, Clarke decided. She would try to rethink things over with Echo and Lexa and the rest of them.

New Year’s would be the time to do just that.

The Northwood clan always held a massive New Year’s celebration, inviting all the most influential and powerful families from all over the Wizarding World. Distance did not play a factor.

Families came from all over the globe, from different continents and countries and cultures. The only requirement being those in attendance had to be pureblood and willing to show actual proof.

Clarke dressed for the night in an ebony dress with charcoal laced spikes sewed into all the linings.

Her parents, for the first time since they started attending, would be arriving separately.

Abigail Griffin left to go first, wearing a pale white evening gown draped in lace and diamonds.

Jake and Clarke Griffin waited for Anya to arrive, dressed in a periwinkle sheath dress and a sapphire necklace. All three of them left for Northwood Hall, that farthest reach of the cold wilds.

Every year the Griffin family attended this celebration and every year it was the same. An extravagant feast, complete with expensive and extraordinary appetizers and entrees. The chandeliers would levitate, the lights rising and falling to the sound of music. The mood was rich, the atmosphere richer. Everyone dressed fancy and paraded their wealth around, drinking alcohol.

Wine and schnapps and champagne and hard liquor that targeted your very happiest memories, only to enhance them ten-fold. That had been the allure to the magic of drinking into the evening.

And when it was time, when the final seconds of the year began counting down, they summoned a giant sphere made from crystalized starlight, that gleamed through the magical glass that shielded people from the heat underneath. That’s all it was: show them the light of a star, without the danger.

When the countdown ended, and the orb of light finally hit the bottom, it shattered and released:

The greatest fireworks this side of the Wizarding World had ever seen or would ever see.

All the lightning of the bright lights and the thunder of the noises but, again, without the danger.

Clarke waited in the Northwood library until then, reading whatever she could because the room was so gigantic. She left Jake and Anya, who were in deep conversation, laughing with each other.

When was the last time her father laughed? He’d been miserable at home because of the fighting.

Her parents couldn’t have a normal conversation without it disintegrating into a shouting match.

Anya smiled radiantly at him. The woman enjoyed her time away from teaching at Beauxbatons. Clarke always thought her father’s best friend smiled the brightest whenever he was around her.

She still remembered the time she saw them hugging before they left for the top of the Eiffel Tower in France during the summer. The hallway had been dark, but they embraced like moon and night.

Her father had been whispering back to her, hands woven into her chocolate hair.

And Anya, with tears in her eyes, whispered softly: “Je suis avec toi” repeatedly.

Clarke once asked her father if he and Anya ever kissed when they had attended Hogwarts, before Anya had transferred away to Beauxbatons. He responded that he never did, and he never would.

Because he was in love with her mother now and that was that.

Clarke then asked him to swear to her and swear to Salazar that what he had told her was the truth.

To which her father looked Clarke straight in the eyes and did just that.

Of course, he wouldn’t. It would ruin their family.

There were times though, when Anya gently held Clarke close and tried teaching her French words.

When the beautiful dame swayed, shifting from one foot to another, while softly singing in French.

When her father looked at her with this look in his eyes and Clarke doubted the word he gave her.

Doubted the legitimacy of his promise.

Because she loved her father and she loved her mother very much. And even though, right at this moment, a rift had grown like a fungus between them.

They would fix it. Because they were her parents and she was their daughter and they were family.

Lexa Northwood had been confiscated by her own parents for the evening, punishment for autumn. She had to spend the night away from all her friends and in the company of some Slytherin boys.

Clarke connected the feelings of bile in the back of her mouth to the thought of Lexa and some boy in the future.

Echo was with her in the library. Her first lieutenant returned, carrying some books from a list Clarke wrote beforehand. The Azgeda girl wanted to get them all, but Clarke insisted she get half.

They sat reading, across from one another, at a table near a window view of the snow-draped maze garden terrace in the back. Clarke burrowed into a third-year book: Spellman’s Syllabary. She had grown bored of second-year things she learned on her own and now attempted to move farther.

Clarke peered at her companion and smiled.

Echo Azgeda wore a beautiful scarlet frock dress that fit her willow figure well. She had ruby feathers in her hair too. Ever since Roan had been disowned, the Azgeda clan just poured over her.

She enjoyed the newfound attention. Echo relished how Queen Nia now treated her like the sun.

The tall girl confided in Clarke that she felt like she inherited the ‘bastard child’ of jokes and joys.

Clarke shook her head at that, the girl sure knew how to pick her words.

Even though Echo didn’t enjoy reading as much as she did, she still tried. The Azgeda girl didn’t dive into stories or delve into poetry like other first years, but she enjoyed scary magical monsters.

Especially the books that showed what the monsters looked like, preyed on and how they hunted.

Yes, the Azgeda particularly liked those kinds of parts.

Clarke suspected Echo’s willingness to read next to her had more to do with keeping her safe rather than keeping her company. Her friend had voiced out concerns of the many enemies that now infested Slytherin. Clarke doubted that anyone would dare try anything against her. She said as much.

“Nothing is happening to you.” Echo growled as they went to the library. “I’ll make sure of that.”

She looked to the girl across from her, deeply entranced in a colorful rendition of how a basilisk glared its victims dead only to coil around their corpses, breaking their bones for easy swallowing.

Clarke thought of the feelings that had brewed inside of her and chewed her bottom lip. Echo was her friend now. She didn’t want the two of them, or Lexa for that matter, to get in trouble anymore.

It was more important to have balance than chaos. That was what her father made clear to her now.

“Echo.” Clarke saw her friend look at her, eyes fluttering up from the top of her book. “Let’s stop.”

“Stop what?” Echo’s eyes bulged. She checked all around them for threats. “Are we in danger?”

“Our flanks are all clear.” The blonde girl laughed, shaking her head. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Oh, you’ve already finished.” The tall, willowy girl said. “Let me find the rest of the books then.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Your reading.”

“No, that’s not-”

“I told you to let me have the rest of that list.”

“Echo just listen to me-”

“You know how short you are compared to the shelves.”

“Stop interrupting.” Clarke commanded. “I need to tell you something important.”

Echo straightened and leaned forward. It was the stance she always used when awaiting orders.

Clarke sighed and shook her head at that. At all of it. Was this all they were? Was this all they would ever be? Just pawns in someone else’s war? She refused to believe that. They were just kids.

They were only children in their first-year.

“Clarke?” Echo asked quietly. “Is everything alright?”

The blonde girl pinched that specific part of her nose, the intersection between her eyes. She felt something wet begin to form there and cursed softly at it. Not now, why’d they have to come now?

“Stop trying to look out for me. You’re always doing that.”

“And I always will.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the only one who looked at me, really looked at me.” Echo’s voice sounded low.

Clarke stopped pinching that part of her nose and looked at her lieutenant.

“And didn’t see a monster.” The tall willowy girl whispered back to her commander.

Silence hung there between the two of them, dead like the winter outside of Northwood Hall.

“Tell me what’s wrong.” Her friend urged gently. “I’ll fix it. You know I will.”

We shouldn’t have to, Clarke thought. She faced away and sadly shook her head. “I want us to stop.”

Echo shot her a concerned look. She reached for Clarke only for the girl to stop her with a gesture.

“It was wrong.” Clarke told Echo quietly with downcast eyes. “I think I’ve always been wrong.”

It began to dawn on Echo’s face, what the blonde girl had been trying to say all this time. Her eyes widened, and she began confusedly shaking her head at her. But when she saw how distraught Clarke looked, how torn between two sides, light and dark, she had seemed. Echo stopped and stared back at her friend, sadly.

She opened her mouth, struggling to say something to Clarke, but then closed it.

No one spoke after that. Both girls, one in a black dress and the other in a red one, sat quietly there.

When Echo slowly opened her mouth again, this time devoted to the thing she’d be saying, they struck.

The chair underneath Clarke pulled out from under her, causing her to fall and smack the marble floor of the library. Echo rose from her chair and brandished her angel oak wand, scowling at their unknown attackers before she too was ripped forwards onto the floor. They looked around them.

Costia and Ontari. The Hetoph sisters. And the only first-year Slytherin girls Clarke had eyed warily from afar, having muttered to both her lieutenants: “Those two will be a problem one day.”

“It would be the library.” Costia drawled, wearing an orange dress. It sparkled with cheap sequins.

“I told you.” Ontari cackled, wearing yellow: “The great Clarke Griffin can’t resist a good read.”

She remembered the laugh she shared with Echo and Lexa when they first heard the sisters’ last name on their sixth night in the Slytherin Common Room, embarrassing them in front of the girls.

“Hetoph?” Clarke snickered. “Sounds a lot like “head off” if you ask me. Is that the way of it?”

Echo drew a line across her own throat with an index finger, clucking a ‘snip’ sound, before crowing wildly. Lexa smiled wolfishly, which pissed Costia off to no end. The two had been childhood friends, Northwood and Hetoph, until Clarke Griffin had entered the picture to ruin it.

The blonde always knew the sisters would hold that gag against her. Petty things held petty grudges. And now she realized her mother had been right. You either strike first or you got struck.

“You don’t want this fight.” Clarke warned. She moved to rise. The sisters took her down again.

Echo flailed wildly, her arms and legs writhing about. She sounded like a trapped animal in a cage.

And she was. The Hetoph girls bound her to the library’s marble floor. Helpless to help her friend.

“I think it’s been a long time coming.” Ontari muttered before adding with spite: “If you ask me.”

“What’s the matter, Griffin?” Costia spat at the blonde. “Can’t fight back without your mad dog?”

The Hetoph girl, this pale and skinny thing who pined after Lexa, then kicked Echo in the chest.

“Stop it!” Clarke tried screaming. But the girls bound her mouth shut and pinned her to the floor.

Costia kicked the tall, willowy girl on the ground again and again. Her lieutenant felt every blow.

“You think you’re the only witch who knows magic?” Costia taunted. “The only clever one here?”

“Let me tell you something, sister!” Ontari jeered: “You’re not the only Slytherin with spells.”

The Slytherin renegades had used a tricky binding spell on Clarke during this. She could neither move her body nor open her mouth to counter their incantations on the pair of them. Clarke cursed inwardly.

The Hetoph sisters traded off kicks all over Echo’s body, taking turns to hit her back and face and arms. In Hogwarts, the pair of them would never dare try this in front of the other Slytherin girls.

But here, in the isolation of an empty library, the cowards felt like queens. And Lexa wasn’t there.

“You have no idea!” Costia giggled madly. She punctuated a sharp kick with every short sentence.

“How long!” Ontari sniggered alongside her. She followed her sister’s lead with kicks and words.

“We’ve wanted!”

“And waited!”

“To do this!”

“To you both!”

Costia reached down to grab a fistful of Clarke’s hair and dragged her upwards. Ontari kept her foot on the back of Echo’s body and watched them. Her friend looked to be bleeding and bruised.

“I always knew something was up with you!” Costia slammed Clarke’s face hard against the cool window glass, the one that overlooked the snowy maze garden. “Ever since you got off that train!”

“…Heda…” Echo choked out. It was a term she used for Clarke in private, a name of endearment.

In the Azgeda family, the name ‘Heda’ meant ‘the one you follow to battle’. Echo called her that.

When they were alone and in the dark, lying in their beds whispering about the world, like sisters.

“You and Muggleborn Blake.” Costia crooned. “He was the one you insulted the most afterwards.”

“Been snogging Mudbloods in secret, have we?” Ontari cooed. “Been eating the dirt in his veins!”

“Watch your bloody mouth!” Echo snarled before a swift kick from Ontari quieted her.

“The only one here with a bloody mouth is you.” Ontari replied. She was right. Echo’s mouth bled.

Costia pressed Clarke’s face harder against the glass. The blonde looked out towards the snow falling outside over the maze garden, covering it all. She heard the countdown beginning to blare in the distance. Everyone’s voices at the party rose, again and again. Clarke had silently begged.

“Five!” The voices grew louder. Clarke begged once for strength and begged twice for deliverance.

Her father had sprinted outside now. She only just realized. She tried calling out to him for help.

“Four!”

Anya followed, laughing and smiling after him. Jake grabbed her body and twirled her around.

“Three!”

The pair of them stood at the start of the maze garden, staring at one another, covered in snow.

“Two!”

Her father pulled his closest, oldest friend towards him, kissing her harder than he ever kissed her mother. Clarke couldn’t believe she didn’t see it before. The chemistry. The passion. It was there.

And she was blind. Jake promised Clarke he wouldn’t. He swore to her and to Salazar’s name he wouldn’t. He was supposed to fix things with her mother. They were going to be a family again.

“One!” The voices gathered louder than ever, but the girls weren’t there to see the ball drop. They weren’t there to see this beautiful and terrible year end with fiery grace. They weren’t there for the explosion of stars and sights that followed, the thunder preceding the flash of the lightning strikes.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” Everyone in Northwood Hall cried. And Clarke cried inside of herself. Only it was a war scream and it felt loud as hell. Their movements and sounds were now camouflaged by the noise of shattering starlight. And the beautiful explosions that followed it. The blonde-haired tempest of a girl returned to the situation, alive with fury.

Clarke didn’t need her wand to deal with the likes of traitors. She winked her right eye with a snarl.

The wind took Costia in the throat. She backed off away from her, clutching at her throat. Gasping.

Clarke knew her blow wouldn’t be as strong as it used to be. Love blinded her. Love was weakness.

But that was over now. Enough of all that. Clarke was finished with all of it.

She felt the bindings leave her body and mouth now. She was free to fight back.

By the time Ontari realized what just happened, Clarke pulled out her weeping willow and slashed.

The whip of the wind lashed across her chest with terrifying force, sending her off Echo’s body.

Her father had lied to her. How could she balance the world when there was chaos inside her heart?

Echo let out a roar of war and, like a kraken rising from the ocean, covered Ontari’s fallen body with her own. Snapping and snarling like the mad dog she was. Echo grabbed the Hetoph girl’s head and slammed it to the ground again and again and again and again. She began cackling madly every time Ontari's head hit the marble. Her laughter tucked in between every single one of her blows, just like their kicks and words had done.

Clarke struck Costia once in the stomach with her wind whip, sending her against a nearby shelf and causing numerous books to collapse onto the floor, and struck her again in the face and chest.

She twirled her wind whip around the Hetoph girl and flicked, making her slam hard onto the floor.

Clarke snapped her fingers so that a spell trapped her against the marble. She advanced menacingly then, twirling her crooked weeping willow wand around and between her fingers with accuracy.

Echo managed to reclaim her angel oak wand and sent off a bang. Ontari began vomiting leeches from her mouth. When she struggled to get away, the Azgeda crawled over her and sent off another.

Maggots began pouring out of her angel oak now, all over Ontari Hetoph. Echo pushed her wand under the bloody girl’s yellow dress and filled the spaces underneath with slimy, wiggling things.

Clarke stood over Costia, feeling so much hate and rage overflowing inside of her that she believed it to be her blood. The blonde-haired tempest of a girl still heard the fireworks outside the library.

She still heard it drowning out everything with noise. The sound of laughter and music tied to it.

“Let’s see if these wounds heal for you!” Clarke screamed as much vengeance as she could muster.

Then she began whipping the Hetoph girl below her with the wind again and again and again and again and again and again.

The cheap orange dress that Costia wore, with all the sequins, ripped with every blow she landed.

“You don’t know where they’ve been!” Echo screeched from nearby, referring to the maggots she was now forcing into Ontari's mouth.

Ontari choked on leeches and maggots alike, writhing underneath her Azgeda attacker, as bloody and bruised as she was, and gagged for mercy.

Clarke slashed and thrashed with her weeping willow wand. She cracked the wind all over Costia.

Then she brought herself back to that night. The night when her mother showed her that memory of herself at nine years old, being tucked in by her grandmother.

She remembered the name now.

A name as old and powerful as the Slytherin souls that surrounded the pensieve in the catacombs.

“Delphini Lestrange.” Her Nana had whispered to Abby all those years ago. She finally told her what she had been called when they locked her inside of Azkaban. “I always liked Delphi better.”

“SHOW ME!” Clarke shrieked, wind-whipping Costia. “SHOW ME WHAT YOU AREN’T!”

And some time afterwards. After Clarke and Echo stood over the weeping girls they had broken. After they fixed the wounds they inflicted and the dresses they ruined. After they threatened Costia and Ontari with more violence if they didn’t get the others to follow and obey without question from now on. After Clarke gently traced her weeping willow wand over Echo's body.

Cleaning the blood from her skin, closing any cuts, and healing any black and blue bruises they left on her friend while whispering repeatedly: “Never again.” It sounded as though Clarke was convincing herself instead of Echo.

After her mother came to collect her and they went home together. After she returned to Hogwarts.

After Clarke gathered all those conflicting feelings she had been brewing and threw them away because the very thought of her father giving her advice sickened her to the core. After the relapse.

After the brutal winter that followed all the days and weeks and months afterwards, Clarke knew.

Spring would come. And it did. The warmth returned with the blooming flowers, sunny breezes, and bright days that followed. Spring also brought back the Broken Lion Boys from their exile.

Harper McIntyre, according to the lone spy left in Gryffindor, had been owling them ever since she returned from winter break. She and Fox and Zoe Monroe and Raven Reyes gathered to that grassy knoll of theirs by the Great Lake. Jasper Jordan and Monty Green accompanied them. And they conjured magical decorations. There were dragon-looking kites and pumpkin lanterns and many bird streamers of every kind that whirled and twirled in the air around the tree that stood watch, the one Harper loved reading books under.

McIntyre, knowing that the boys she knew loved sandwiches, made sure to create dozens of them with the help of her girls. A dozen different mixtures: roast beef and cheddar and horseradish, fish and chips and potato salad, chicken salad, tuna melts, grilled steak with peppers and onions and siracha mayo, three different kinds of grilled cheeses, peanut butter and jelly, sausage and spicy brown mustard, and a whole lot more. They also prepared iced pumpkin cider and an assortment of chocolate candies and other sweets to share with the boys upon arrival.

And the arrival came. Bellamy Blake, Roan Azgeda, and Nathan Miller returned to that grassy knoll by the Great Lake where they took their lunches. And everyone there began celebrating with one another.

McIntyre rushed at the three boys, a blazing look upon her face, and threw her arms around them.

Clarke watched it all from afar and remembered. She remembered the answer.

The answer to her grandmother’s question. Clarke couldn’t give her Nana an answer back then.

Because the answer wasn’t really an answer, but another question.

“What’s weaker than an enemy at war with itself?” Her grandmother had asked on her deathbed.

Nine-year-old Clarke didn’t know it then. But eleven-year-old Clarke knew it now.

The blonde-haired tempest of girl whispered it: “What’s worse than the wreckage that follows it?”


End file.
